After he configured the network interface with dhcpcd eth0, I told my colleague to start the ssh server so I could go on working. So I told my colleague there to download the System Rescue CD for PPC and boot that Mac with it, so I could hopefully access my XFS-formatted external drive from it. And what kind of a sysadmin would I be risking my company’s precious data? It turns out my colleagues in the local branch in Berlin (where both the TeraStation and the server are) do have an old Apple Mac G4 there. There was an -L switch mentioned, but it was said to be dangerous and could potentially lead to data loss. So again I read man pages for xfs_repair. Now this would make sense, since the TeraStation has a PowerPC processor and the server uses two Xeon processors. Wikipedia told me some unimportant stuff about it, and at the bottom of the page (where the fuck else?) there was a note that mentioned that xfs is actually dependant on the architecture (i386, x86_64 etc.) and that I’d have to “clear” the journal when migrating to another architecture. So I decided to read me a little into what XFS is. I yum-installed xfstools and tried xfs_check and xfs_repair, but none helped. Mounting that external drive on our server failed though with the message “xfs unknown file system”. Now guess what, the TeraStation uses XFS for the external drives. But hey, we have that external hard drive that the TeraStation makes its backups on, right? Right. Also, I couldn’t mount the samba shares with mount.cifs on another server, because the samba shares obviously were gone.ĭisassembling the TeraStation and connecting its hard drives to another computer wouldn’t make sense because a RAID array is being used. There is rsync on the TeraStation, but it can’t be used to transfer files over the network, because – as I mentioned before – there’s no SSH. A few months earlier, I hacked the crontab (a “little” security hole in that firmware) which let me run a script with root privileges, so I managed to chmod the /etc/sudoers to 777 and – finally – get root access. Unfortunately, the TeraStation does not ship with SSH, but I was able to get into it via telnet. So, anyway, the data stored on the TeraStation was very important and needed to be accessed. Just as advice: NEVER EVER BUY SUCH CRAP! Yes, I was root, I was owner, smb.conf had 777, everything. I could also echo stuff > smb.conf – it would always stay 0 bytes in size. I could edit it with vi (you don’t have vim on that minilinux) and save, nothing would happen. It couldn’t be accessed from Windows machines anymore because the smb.conf was completely empty. Now the TeraStation was horribly, almost hilariously damaged. It was connected to a Buffalo TeraStation (that’s a NAS, sort of, with a super small linux). It can be downloaded from the official wiki.Today I experienced one of these problems: My colleague in Berlin had that external hard disk drive. But as a backup and restore tool, I find it to be very useful and provide many tools you might need in a lightweight live CD environment. SystemRescueCD certainly isn't for the faint of heart, and you'll need a reasonable previous amount of experience with Linux to be able to use it effectively. GUI applications included in the distribution feature Gparted, for easy reformatting and repartitioning of disks, both Firefox and Dillo for any emergency browsing needs and many other basic graphical programs. This is fine if you're reasonably proficient with the command line or know how to do this, but it does raise the barrier significantly for non-Linux people who want a restore system. One thing that is worth mentioning is that it isn't loaded up by default, you have to start it with startx. There are also lots of other system tools, including full read-write support for NTFS partitions through ntfs-3g, meaningĪs well as the command line side of things, the CD also has a GUI available, which uses WindowMaker. I particularly find partimage to be useful, and use SysRecCD to do backups of my Linux system in this way. If you are already a Linux whiz, you have a full command line available to you, as you'd expect, and an impressive array of tools you might need. SystemRescueCD includes a whole host of tools that are very useful. The idea is, something bad happens, and you then boot into the CD and use the tools it provides to fix the problem, or hopefully at the very least save your data. There are quite a few Linux live CDs out there designed for the purpose of rescue systems. Bad things happen, and sometimes those bad things will happen to your computer, or a computer you are responsible for.
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