Medicine for a Sick Linux Box

Squidgee writes "This is the site for "LIAP: Linux In A Pillbox". It is an interesting recovery distro made in the vein of pharmaceuticals; each floppy based 'minidistro' cures one specific Linux ailment. Or, as Luke Komasta (The creator of LIAP) puts it: "My Linux project contains "pills". Each of them is good for one disease, but it doesn't work good enough for another. When you know what you need a Linux for, you may choose a good pill. And of course, as you know, there is no drug which is good for treating all diseases." It's an extremely interesting approach to Linux recovery, and one that appears to be more effective than the other varieties of floppy/mini-cd based recovery systems. Worth downloading in case you ever need it!"

Comments

Diagnostic disk?

[Dr. Spork]

Well, for those who don't have enough experience to correctly diagnose what ails their box, it seems logical to make a diagnosis diskette, one that doesn't fix anything, but might give them a clue which pill has the best chance of fixing their problem.

blue pill ?

[tiwason]

And does the blue pill disk install windows ??

A pill for . .

[borg05]

What disk do you use if your floppy disk drivers break?

Pills?

[Soko]

Don't tell me. Lemme guess.

The "Blue pill" returns your Linux machine back to normal function. The "Red pill" puts a trace on the kernel, and "shows you just how deep the rabbit hole goes...."

Soko

Dear god

[screwballicus]

I'd always thought, to a large extent, the frustration of dealing with Windows and Mac had been due to their perverse propensity for the use of abstract metaphors which complicate rather than explicate problems. That may be helpful for new users, but new users Linux users do not tend to be. Do Linux users want to be treated like babies all of a sudden? I know I certainly don't. And, somehow, I don't believe the linux community in general is going to be too impressed with useful utility encased in meaningless, obfuscating metaphors.

Would like comparison disk

[Krellan]

More than a recovery disk/CD, of which several already exist, I would love a comparison disk. It would be for use after suspecting an attack.

It would boot from floppy or CD, guaranteeing that it would be in control and not trusting the hard drive for anything at all.

It would contain Tripwire-style keys for every system-installed file in the distribution. When booted, it would check each file against these keys, and output a list of files that do not match.

So, if one has been rooted with a good rootkit that modifies the operating system to cloak hacked files, one could then boot this disk/CD and be sure of being completely in control with a known good operating system. All files on the hard disk would be able to be accessed honestly, for a true comparison!

Does such a tool exist already?

It would be fairly easy to add this to the Red Hat installer. In addition to having an option to install, it would have an option to compare an existing system. It would go through the standard installation steps (choosing partitions, etc.) but compare instead of copy. A byte-for-byte comparison could then be done, for true honesty. If any mismatches are found, it would complain loudly, and give you the option at the end of simply overwriting the changed files (under your control, of course, and on an individual basis).

What do you think? Does such a tool already exist? I would love to use it if it does.

Re:Would like comparison disk

[lpontiac]

You can implement this yourself easily enough.

Let's say you want to do it for all the files in /root, /bin, /usr/local/bin and /etc. The following will get you a list of md5sums:

#!/bin/sh
find -s /root /bin /etc /usr/local/bin | while read x ; do
md5 $x
done;

Put the output of that into a file after a fresh install. Save it to disk. At any later point, do it again into another file. Use diff to find the differences.

The wonderful thing about Unix is that you can do this sort of thing with the standard shell and 5 lines of script :P