Looking for feedback on this gentoo based mini rescue system

[bastibasti]

Hi guys,

I am a big gentoo fan, and I use it on all of my boxes, I just get annoyed with other distributions.
However sometimes things break and I also have standalone boxes without monitor etc.
In that case I like to use a livecd to chroot into the broken system and fix it. - however no common livecd starts a ssh deamon and is ready to log in

I know this is unsecure, but for recovery within my own net - chance of getting hacked is less than 0%

So I put together this little rescue system

It is a very skimmed down version (~50MB) of Gentoo linux (pentoo kernel) that intents to start networking, an openSSH server, so you can login and chroot into your broken system.

In case I made some licensing issues, let me know. I will immediately fix these issues.


System requirements
- i686
- at least 192MB of RAM
I checked the package on qemu and a VIA-EPIA PC


1) Installation
Unpack the image file and write it to a USB memory
eg: dd if=usb_img.img of=/dev/xxx
where xxx is supposed to be exchanged against the USB memory. (sdb etc)

2) Network configuration

Networking is configured by kernel command line (you need to edit syslinux.cfg)
Like that it is not necessary to have a monitor/ keyboard connected to the PC.


Examples:

netip_eth0=dhcp <- configure eth0 using dhcp
netip_eth0=192.168.1.10,255.255.255.0,192.168.1.1,192.168.1.1
devicename=IP,MASK,DefaultGW,Nameserver

You can provide multiple interface configurations, however gateway cannot be overwritten.

3) Login[/u]

default root password is "rescue"

ToDo
- Raid Support
- Luks Support
- Maybe include midnight commander

Please if you have time to play, get the first working sample http://goo.gl/xUDEe
and feedback any comment

[xaviermiller]

Hello,

What is the benefit of your system compared to SystemRescueCD, which is also Gentoo-based?
_________________
Kind regards,
Xavier Miller

[bastibasti]

I never saw this livecd - what a bummer
It has all I needed

Appart from all the features I needed,
- my setup is significantly smaller, but I guess nowadays that is not an argument.
- my setup only has the kernel and initrd, which gives you the option to load modules etc by yourself, in case the livecd cannot be found