Finnix LiveCD Recovery Distribution

From LinodeWiki

Please see the article in the Linode Library on Using the Finnix Recovery LiveCD for more information and additional resources.

The Finnix LiveCD image is a recovery distribution. It's an entirely separate read-only Linux install. You can set it up as an alternative boot profile in your Linode Members area. Finnix uses none of your disk space. Even if you don't need it right now, you can set it up and keep it there for a time when you do need it.

Contents 1 What is it useful for? 2 Setting it up 3 Accessing your drives 4 Editing files 5 About Finnix

[edit] What is it useful for?

1. If you mess up your Linode severely enough that you can't log into it using ssh or even LISH but still want to try and repair it rather than re-install it, you can boot into Finnix, mount your filesystems and fix things there.
2. Some changes to your system (like re-partitioning drives) are very hard to do without a recovery distro, because you can't remount / freely when something is always reading from it or writing to it.

[edit] Setting it up

These instructions are copied from caker's Finnix announcement in the forums:

1. Create an empty Configuration Profile (Configurations sub-tab, click "Create a new Configuration Profile")
2. Select "Recovery - Finnix (kernel)" for the kernel
3. Select "Recovery - Finnix (iso)" for /dev/ubda
4. Select "Recovery - Finnix (initrd)" for the initrd (right below disk images)
5. Add your disk images that you need to repair/mount from inside Finnix to the remaining /dev/ubd slots.
6. Boot the new profile
7. Use the Lish Console to access your Finnix install

[edit] Accessing your drives

This will be the most common reason to need to use a recovery distro: you need to get at data on your harddrives. When you set up Finnix, you chose to make your disk images available to it as above ("Add your disk images that you need to repair/mount from inside Finnix to the remaining /dev/ubd slots"). You can mount them as follows:

• Add a mount point (you can give it a more meaningful name than "diskimage1", such as "home" or "root" or "debian" or...):

# mkdir /mnt/diskimage1

• Mount your disk image (lets call it /dev/ubdX, but it will be one of /dev/ubdb, /dev/ubdc etc as configured when you set it up) at the mount point:

# mount /dev/ubdX /mnt/diskimage1

All your files on that disk image are now available under /mnt/diskimage1.

You can do this for as many disk images as you have: just make a separate mount point for each one.

Finnix's / is just stored in RAM, therefore all mount point directories will be lost and need to be re-created every time you boot it.

[edit] Editing files

Finnix has four file editing programs installed: ed, vi, nano (which is like "pico" if you know that) or joe. Unless you already know ed, vi or nano, we suggest using joe.

You can start joe by passing it the path of the file to edit, eg:

# joe /mnt/diskimage1/..../filename

[edit] About Finnix

Finnix is a LiveCD (Linux that can be booted from a CD without install) rescue distribution. See the Finnix website and the Project History.