can knoppix save my gentoo server?

uglyman

hi guys, I have a colo server with serverpronto. the deal is that the price is good but the service sucks. great uptime and all that, but they charge you per reboot, and per all other stuff you need the tech support for. You get no console access and no power switch access.

recently my server was rebooted (not at my request, but that is another story). I had about a year of uptime on it at that point, and I am sure I had absent mindedly screwed something up when updating some software along the way. the server never came back up, apparently some problem loading the network drivers (according to the dumbass at the console).

I had them boot it from a liveCD and get me in via ssh so I could take a look. I decided it was kind of hopeless to trouble shoot so I decided to just update everything (this thing is not really mission critical btw... heh). I built a new kernel with everything I could think of and then tried to set up grub to fallback to some old ones if it failed.

well all of them failed.... and so I had them put the CD back in, blah blah blah.... I have been through this several times now, and I am sure they are going to try to charge me for all of these reboots (I have to have them do it so the CD can be put in and out) The latest problem is that the screen simply goes blank after the kernel is chosen in the bootloader.

So what I would like to know is if I could take something like the liveCD which boots fine, but which allows remote login by default (a knoppix type thing for example) and install it on the hard drive next to the existing gentoo distro... then I would like to set grub to fallback to that if the main system doesn't start. that way I could continue to login, edit the kernel and stuff, then reboot and see which system loads. I could repeat this as many times as needed at no additional cost until the main system starts up.

The main issue is that I need to do it without blowing away all the data on there with fdisk... so ideally it would just go in a directory in /

any ideas?
thanks

geforce · l33t Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 654 Location: Canada

Do you have free space or HDs ?
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uglyman · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 3:49 am Post subject:

no I only have one hard drive. The colo place partitions it and installs their basic gentoo before you get it, and without console access you are kind of stuck with their stupid partitioning scheme... it would just be expensive to have it done any other way.

output from fdisk:

geforce · l33t Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 654 Location: Canada

how large is the swap ?

Can you remove a part of the swap for the testings ?
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uglyman · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 5:00 am Post subject:

I had wondered that too. I think its too small to do what I want, but I am not very familiar with these little linux distros I don't know how much room they need.

Akkara · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 5:41 am Post subject:

I'm no expert in this, but this thought comes to mind:

Could you put a really tiny root in hda1 - bare necessities sort of stuff - a /etc, a fstab, whatever in /bin that's needed, along with some stuff in a initrd to mount a loopback image file that's stored in hda2 which contains the rest of your rescue system?

Or maybe a danm-small-linux, just enough for remote login and rescue, entirely in hda1.

Good luck!

(Aside: it is curious they put swap last. I find the last sectors of a hard drive are the slowest to do i/o to.)

uglyman · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 6:26 am Post subject:

thanks for the replies so far. I had thought about using the boot partition too.... but I had not thought of splitting a loopback out and putting it on hda2... that might be the way to go.

in the meantime I built a kernel based on the one on the liveCD... and used copies of the liveCDs module configs. if this doesn't boot then I will know for pretty sure it isn't the kernel but maybe my grubconfig instead. I am waiting for them to reboot it now. **fingers crossed**

I agree that having swap last is stupid... I can't figure out why they do that... but their prices really do make it worth putting up with their BS. I could not afford to have a colo box if not for this deal. I only pay 30 a month and I get the whole box to myself.

geforce · l33t Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 654 Location: Canada

If this doesn't work I'd suggest to either try damn small linux or diagnosis the problem.

Anyways a network driver shouldn't be so problematic !
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uglyman · Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 1:29 am Post subject:

I am trying to fix the server but it sure would be nice to set something like this up in the future. I will have to experiment with it a little. thanks for the ideas everybody.

geforce · l33t Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 654 Location: Canada

Thinking about it,

don't expect a GRUB fallback in case of a kernel panic.

It'll only fallback if it can't find the first kernel.
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uglyman · Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 2:20 am Post subject:

are you sure?.. from what I read it was possible to make it fallback after a certain time if the system isn't up.

uglyman · Posted: Wed Jul 11, 2007 2:24 am Post subject:

found it:

source: