Emergency installation in case of crasch (which distro?)

simvin76 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 96

Hello

I will leave my computer at the university computer society, and will not be able to physically reach it during the coming summer. To handle a server crasch, power failure, etc I thought about doing the following.

The point would be if the system isn't shut down the proper way, it will boot the emergency installation and I can manually do fsck. Upon a succesful reboot, it will boot the gentoo system.
Is this a good idea? My main question is really if anyone has a suggestion of a really small/suitable distro.

Take care
/Simon

levicc00123 · n00b Joined: 16 Dec 2004 Posts: 59

that's what LiveCDs are for, you can boot them and do repairs without needing another distro, the Gentoo LiveCD is perfect for what you described.
_________________
Gentoo 205.0 running on a Persario X1000 laptop with a 2.6.11 kernel. running emacs, emacspeak, eflite and w3m.

simvin76 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 05 Oct 2005 Posts: 96

Yes, the LiveCD's are excellent, but they will not help me when my computer is 1000 km away. I wanted a method to be able to fix the system if there is a risk it's broken, and I'm not in the same town.

/Simon

meph84 · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 6:37 am Post subject:

Well, even another gentoo install could do the trick, I think. At least it would be as small as you need it, with no useless things, which you wouldn't ever need. And during that 'repair process', if you would decide to use another program, nothing is simpler than just emerging it....
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Gentoo Linux 2.6.15-gentoo-r7
AMD 64 3000+, 2GB RAM 400Mhz, GeForce 6800,
180GB Samsung HDD, LG DVD Burner,
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS, Winfast 2000XP Deluxe TV,
KDE 3.5

PMcCauley · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 7:41 am Post subject:

Unless you have faultly hardware or are running buggy software Gentoo should run for a very long time with no problems. Using Gentoo would be fine you can make copies of your existing files and use ldd to determine what modules you need to copy. For increased stability make sure unnessasary things are no running on the system and you can clean up your kernel if there are unused items in there.

Patrick

BitJam · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 9:08 am Post subject:

I think you've come up with a good plan. I agree with the others who say that Gentoo would make a fine stripped down "reserve" system. It sounds like the major problem it will help you recover from is a power failure. Make sure you use a journaling file system. They say that ext3 can journal data as well as meta-data which might be a very good thing for you. Take a look at the ext3 thread for details.

You should be very sure to umount your /boot partition after re-writing grub.conf. That way it will be less likely to get trashed when the system crashes. Same thing for your rescue partition. In fact I would put them both together on a separate disk if that is possible. Also, make sure that you put a spare copy of the main fstab on the reserve system so you don't have to rely on your memory.

I understand that you can't use a LiveCD since no one will be there to take it out, but you might want to take a look at RescueCD which is a small LiveCD based on Gentoo. You would probably want to consider copying their list of installed packages.

It would probably be a good idea to leave a LiveCD near the computer just in case you need to move heaven and earth and get someone near the computer help you bring it back to life.

You'll want the rescue system to send you an email or something when it wakes up. If the box is a server of some sort or just has a fixed ip, you could also set up a watch-dog program that "pings" the box at fixed intervals and notifies you if it can't get through.