I've used Finnix[1] for recovery tasks in the past. Having a good Linux distro on a USB stick makes me feel ready for any (most often self inflicted) computer emergency. It's the sysadmin equivalent of a Swiss army knife.
I share the same feeling. Using sysresccd [1] for it. One anecdote I remember from around 2010; sysresccd starts mdadm, scans all block devices and tries to automatically start md devices. This behaviour shocked me while booting a passive storage server which was connected to a JBOD enclosure. The active server already had the devices started and mounted (was lustre at that time). I was lucky, no data was corrupted ... pfew
Anyways, do you also know about systesccd and could you share differenced between those?
I combined several more live cd (such as gparted, clonezilla, memtest, ubuntu installer) in one usb stick thru the use of YUMI-UEFI. Very handy for troubleshooting esp when you are offline.
I use Ventoy[0] for this purpose (multi boot drives). With it you only have to format the drive once. Ten you just copy .iso images to the drive as files and they become available to boot from. It's great.
Nice software. Pity the hosting is so slow (I remember 2400 baud, and it's not that slow, but in the modern world it's slow); wonder if the author accepts donations to make it faster.
That said, the SystemRescue download from sourceforge was slower.. ended up finding a torrent and checking the SHA.
Same here, I feel unsafe if I don't have my USB toolkit with me. Long time user of UBCD and a custom Ubuntu images with some block recovery utilities. Shit has saved my ass so many times
I ran grml (in those days it had an option to install) as my desktop for a few years in the mid to late 2000s. Was really very nice and so unbelievably fast.
A question I didn't see in the FAQ: is there or has there ever been
some crazy way of mounting the grml installation media on something
like a tmpfs in memory that can still work with the root partition
unmounted? I wanted to install an unsupported distro on a digital
ocean droplet that way once but I'm not sure whether I only dreamed
it.
I have very fond memories of GRML, I was using this as a student in my part time sysadmin job. It was a great tool I used every day. It's nice to still see it around.
23 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 59.3 ms ] thread[1] https://www.finnix.org/
I've used it extensively while preparing servers for production with the autorun feature[1]
[0] https://www.system-rescue.org/
[1] https://www.system-rescue.org/manual/Run_your_own_scripts_wi...
Anyways, do you also know about systesccd and could you share differenced between those?
1: https://www.system-rescue.org/
https://www.velociraptors.info/vad/
https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/01/the-ultimate-boot-stick/
ref: https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/
[0] https://www.ventoy.net/
That said, the SystemRescue download from sourceforge was slower.. ended up finding a torrent and checking the SHA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comic_strip)
here is the URL -- https://grml.org/zsh/
it's easy to install and works wonderfully out-of-the-box. for arch users there's also a native package. -- https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/any/grml-zsh-config...
edit: typo
https://grml.org/grml-debootstrap/
I always keep the latest GRML96 (32bit + 64bit) on a bootable flash drive.