Depenguinator "Upgrades" Linux to BSD

cperciva writes "Many systems around the world have been possessed by penguins and dead rats. It would be nice to exorcize these evil spirits, but this can be difficult without physical access to the machines in question. Thanks to a new depenguinator, it is now possible to upgrade Linux systems to run FreeBSD 5.x without requiring anything more than an SSH connection." Clever idea.

Comments

You have been rooted, welcome to BSD

[diersing]

I'm now scared.

The next root kit is announced and within days all machines have been *upgraded* to BSD. Argh

Re:You have been rooted, welcome to BSD

[skaffen42]

I think we finally have proof that BSD is dead. I mean, this is the clearest attempt at daemonic possession I have ever seen.

Re:You have been rooted, welcome to BSD

[EvilAlien]

I'm really dissapointed that nobody got around to writing a Welchia variant that upgrades vulnerable Windows boxes to Linux. It would have been a business move to gain desktop market share that even Bill Gates would have applauded.

Oh well, snooze ya lose.

Re:You have been rooted, welcome to BSD

[KilobyteKnight]

I'm really dissapointed that nobody got around to writing a Welchia variant that upgrades vulnerable Windows boxes to Linux

People would be calling MS tech support in droves:

"I knew something was different because I haven't seen that comforting blue screen in a long time."

"I'm glad those ugly colors are gone now, but I can't find Freecell anymore"

"The paperclip is gone and I don't know how to get it back"

"When I try to run the email attachments it just doesn't work"

Hmm...

[RobKow]

How do you moderate an entire article as flamebait? ;)

Cool stuff, but the write-up is a little, uhm, polarizing?

Re:Hmm...

[the uNF cola]

Yup. No different from the linux polarized messages we see from time to time. Nothign to see here.. just some people proud of their work :)

Re:Hmm...

[technoid_]

Just think, if it was about "upgrading" windows boxes to Linux it would not be considered flamebait. It would be applauded by the slashdot sheep.

Gee, could it be that we have some double standards...naah, couldn't be that....

technoid

Re:Hmm...

[sempf]

Could be worse, we could be talking about a package to upgrade Linux to Windows 2003.

Re:Hmm...

[richie2000]

upgrade Linux to Windows 2003.

You are upside-down - up has become down and down is up. Please turn yourself over.

I myself have upgraded twice, first from Win2000 Server to Red Hat 8 and then to Gentoo.

Re:Hmm...

[molnarcs]

I'm a freebsd user (5.1 - cvsupping to 5.2rc2 at the moment) and I love it. Contrary to some myths, it is great on the desktop. There are some things that just work. Put one line in your kernel config file (devce pcm) and you can just plug any supported sound card in, and it will just work, without the need for any configuration. The same goes with digital cameras: plug it in, and mount_msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/camera and there you go. Configuration is no more difficult than slackware (in fact, its easier, with automatic dependency checking/resolution ala apt-get, or by simply using the ports system). On the other hand...

I agree with parent post ... sadly, this announcment will be considered as flamebait. I don't understand this, really. I signed up to bsdforums when switched to BSD, and I must say its one of the friendliest forums I ever been to (including mandrakeusers.org or pclo which are also great). I don't find the hostility against linux in bsd users there the way I find hostility towards bsd users from linux users here on slashdot or recently, even osnews.In fact, there is a linux section (other os) on bsdforums, and I saw people helping out with fedora install or whatnot there without any 'use bsd instead' notes. I wish this continual flamewar would end, but frankly, I believe (mod me down if you wish) that most hostility comes from linux users. If you find some bsd folks here a little touchy, considering the amount of trolling every bsd announcment gets, it is a small miracle that people still come here for bsd news, that they are not as bitter as one would expect (but than, they - warning, flamebait! - seems to be more mature.

This is not because BSD is better or something. I like linux as much as I do BSD, I just like to use the latter better, because it is more interesting/fun to _ME_. I believe the linux crowd can be (and maybe it is) as 'mature' as bsd folks, but it is a more diverse group as well as considerably larger, so I think there is more room for a small but vocal minority to ruin the relationship and raise ill will towards each other. I wish that more considerate linux users would help out modding down trolls, afterall, we both have profited from each other's work.

Unfortunately, due to licencing, code exchange is mostly a one way road (BSD > Linux), but still BSD has to thank for GCC (well, not specifically linux) or the ULE scheduler (which is partly based on a linux developer's work - more linux specific) without which our beloved OS would be poorer.

Anyhow, the point I was trying to make is that this article can sadly be considered a flamebait, although we see similar announcment without anyone fearing that it is on the 'other' side. It would be nice to live without fears that such announcments would attract a large amount of trolling, to think that the article (read it!) has its on technical merits that can be interesting to anyone who visits slashdot (nerds?) no matter what OS they use.

Re:Hmm...

[secolactico]

He. I tought it was more funny than flamebaiting.

How long before it gets added to debian or gentoo as a package?

"apt-get install freebsd" or "emerge freebsd".

There goes my productive day... Now I *have* to try this. I'll set up a linux box and see if I can depenguinate it.

He... even the name's funny.

Re:Hmm...

[Paradise Pete]

Just think, if it was about "upgrading" windows boxes to Linux it would not be considered flamebait. It would be applauded by the slashdot sheep.

So you can't see how saying one thing is flamebait, but saying the opposite is not?
Example:
You're a moron.
You're no moron.
It also depends on your audience. Saying "Abortion is murder" at a pro-choice meeting might well be flamebait, but saying it at a pro-life meeting certainly is not.

Re:Hmm...

[dasunt]

How long before it gets added to debian or gentoo as a package?

"apt-get install freebsd" or "emerge freebsd".

Debian is already flirting with demonic possession in different ways

Ne'ermind the hopefully optimistic other project

I'm gonna sit back at a safe distance

[CompWerks]

and watch this flame war. Marshmallows anyone?

Now all we need is..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. a worm to upgrade all windows boxes to linux remotely :D

Re:Now all we need is..

[skinfitz]

March 29, 1999 What started out as a prank posting to comp.os.linux.advocacy yesterday has turned into one of the most significant viruses in computing history. The creator of the virus, who goes by the moniker "Anonymous Longhair", modified the well-known Melissa[1] virus to download and install Linux on infected machines. "It's a work of art," one Linux advocate told Humorix after he looked through the Tuxissa virus source code. "This virus goes well beyond the feeble troublemaking of Melissa." The advocate enumerated some of the tasks the virus performs in the background while the user is blissfully playing Solitaire: Once the virus is activated, it first works on propogating itself. It has a built-in email harvesting module that downloads all the pages referenced in the user's Internet Explorer bookmarks and scans them for email addresses. Using Outlook, the virus sends a copy of itself to every email address it comes across. After it has successfully reproduced, the virus begins the tricky process of upgrading the system to Linux. First, the virus modifies AUTOEXEC.BAT so that the virus will be re-activated if the system crashes or is shut down while the upgrade is in process. Second, the virus downloads a stripped-down Slackware distribution, using a lengthy list of mirror sites to prevent the virus from overloading any one server. Then the virus configures a UMSDOS filesystem to install Linux on. Since this filesystem resides on a FAT partition, there is no need to re-partition the hard drive, one of the few actions that the Word macro language doesn't allow. Next, the virus uncompresses the downloaded files into the new Linux filesystem. The virus then permanently deletes all copies of the Windows Registry, virtually preventing the user from booting into Windows without a re-install. After modifying the boot sector, the virus terminates its own life by rebooting the system. The computer boots into the Slackware setup program, which automatically finishes the installation of Linux. Finally, the dazed user is presented with the Linux login prompt and the text, "Welcome to Linux. You'll never want to use Windows again. Type 'root' to begin..." The whole process take about two hours, assuming the user has a decent Internet connection. Since the virus runs invisibly in the background, the user has no chance to stop it until it's too late. The email message that the virus is attached to has the subject "Important Message About Windows Security". The text of the body says, "I want to let you know about some security problems I've uncovered in Windows 95/98/NT, Office 95/97, and Outlook. It's critically important that you protect your system against these attacks. Visit these sites for more information..." The rest of the message contains 42 links to sites about Linux and free software. Slashdot is one of those links. "That could spell trouble," one Slashdot expert told Humorix. "Slashdot could fall victim to the new 'Macro Virus Effect' if this virus continues to propogate at its present exponential growth rate. Red Hat's portal site, another site present on the virus' links list, seems to be quite sluggish right now..." Details on how the virus started are a bit sketchy. The "Anonymous Longhair" who created it only posted it to Usenet as an early April Fool's gag, a demonstration of how easy it would be to mount a "Linux revolution". Some other Usenet reader is responsible for actually spreading the virus into the wild. One observer speculated, "I imagine the virus was first sent to the addresses of several well-known spammers. The virus probably latched on to the spammer's email lists and began propagating at a fantastic rate. With no boundary to its growth, this thing could wind up infecting every single Net-connected Wintel box in the world. Wouldn't that be a shame!" Linus Torvalds, who just left for a two week vacation, was unavailable for comment at press time. We have a strong feeling that his vacation will be cut short very soon...

Re:Now all we need is..

[Anonymous Coward]

Guys? Let's not keep lauding every new 20 lines of shell script and sophomoric disk duping tools as a new invention. And "making sure the first 40 Mbytes is not in use" is non-trivial. In most cases, it involves relocating the "/boot" partition. "/boot" is almost never necessary these days, you can put its contents on "/", but it's still awkward to do.

Switching from one OS to another is not completely obvious to do at its best. I've written tools that do extremely similar things in Linux, although I stuffed the OS image into a swap space at the *END* of the disk, and completely automated the OS installation procedure to do a complete "burn to bare metal" and completely partition it as desired. Unfortunately, this guy's approach does not allow a graceful recovery if the middle step fails. If you use the Linux LILO tool, you can, by using "lilo -D" to set a default OS, but using "lilo -R" to set the next reboot to use the other OS for one time only.

It's easy to do in the Linux world, because you can chroot to the new partition and run "grub-install" or "lilo" from there. It's tougher in the cross-platform world: getting it to correctly write an MBR is considerably more difficult. I normally solve it for Linux/Windows/Solaris/what-ever by using the Linux-based MBR generation tools, then if I really feel the need to flush the Linux partitions and blow away the MBR, use the other OS's native MBR tools while running that other OS.

But the basic technique is at least 3 years old, hardly worthy of slashdotting.

Similar tool for Debian

[tuxzone]

Looks like a great tool. Unfortunality for the daemons, I want to replace my dead rat (7.2) with a Debian branded penguin. I would love to do that upgrade online. Any tips or tools?
Thanks!

Re:Similar tool for Debian

[vadim_t]

Use debootstrap. It will create a minimal install in any folder. Then chroot, and there you go, a small Debian system. Using that, you can either install Debian on another partition while running another distribution, or I suppose you also could replace your current install with Debian by booting into single user mode, and replacing your old system with Debian.

While you should be able to simply chroot into your new system and start adding stuff, I'd be a very good idea to boot it first. Debian will need to run some scripts on boot to finish configuring itself.

I'd go with the first option. The second one is too easy to screw up if you don't know what you're doing.

Re:Similar tool for Debian

[Marsala]

Well, I don't know of a tool, but how about HOWTO?

Have a good one. :)

Re:Similar tool for Debian

[Alioth]

I use User-Mode-Linux for my web/email/DNS servers. The co-lo that rents servers only rents RedHat servers. The 'host' still runs RedHat, but really very little of it - I have my own custom kernel (with skas patch, very useful if you are running UML virtual machines) on the RedHat host, plus iptables to act as a firewall. The RedHat host conceptually just runs as a network router.

The real servers are all UML instances, all running Debian. The UML page on Sourceforge has a minimal Debian root disk image. I based my root images from these (created a new filesystem on the RedHat system of the appropriate size, mounted both, and cp -a from the minimal Debian install to the root filesystem file I was going to use, edited /mnt/etc/network/interface etc. to set the right IP addresses etc.) then booted. After that, it's just a case of using apt-get to get the packages you want to run.

The nice thing about separating all your services on different VMs within one host is you can apply decent firewall rules for each VM. If, say, your DNS UML got rooted because of an unpatched BIND (unlikely with Debian, since you can just apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to keep up to date) the skript kiddie - instead of having the run of your whole server and being able to deface your website (or worse) is locked into your DNS UML. Add proper egress firewall rules with iptables on the host, and you can prevent most skript kiddie attacks from being able to work.

Although I like the BSDs (I like all UNIX style OS, well, except a certain company whose name need not be mentioned), they can't yet (natively) do the equivalent of user mode Linux which is something I find incredibly useful. Hopefully they will in the future.

HOWTO - Install Debian Onto a Remote Linux System

[vinsci]

Personally, I find this howto more useful. ;-) HOWTO - Install Debian Onto a Remote Linux System

Wow... a Linux bashing article on SlashDot!

[tommck]

This is going to go over like a pregnant nun!

Re:Wow... a Linux bashing article on SlashDot!

[Zathrus]

a pregnant nun

Which is another way to "depenguinate".

Yes, I did just watch Blues Brothers a couple nights ago.

pff, old stuff

[sweede]

This isnt new, I changed 3 of my dedicated servers (2 debian 1 redhat) to Gentoo using a doc thats almost 2 years old that was based of a "how to remote install BSD"

you can do this with any system that lets you bootstrap the OS from the harddrive (i.e. gentoos stage tarballs).

Instant system trash

[Fizzl]

So, it writes a bootloader, ramdisk loader scripts and a bare bones BSD image to the beginning of your disk, trashing the partitioning (not sure about the last bit. That's the impression I got).

Effective, yet mischievously evil.

Well. Uhoh.. I don't know what to think about this. I mean, it's kinda neat. It's called depenguinator to make clear it's going to get rid of your linux, butbut...
I still think the way of operation is very crude and evil.

It says:

This code is beta-quality at best. Do not use this unless you know what you're doing.

I'd personally go as far as saying:
Do not use this unless you are reallyreallyabsolutely sure you want to permanently destroy your current system.

Windows - Freenix

[aking137]

I've often wondered if this could be done with Windows - if one could make a (perhaps large) Windows executable that, when you double click on it, assimilates your system and turns it into a Linux box. (Which could in turn provide the depenguinators with lots more machines to work on.)

Win9x should be more straight forward - you can boot a linux kernel directly from a real DOS prompt using loadlin (although this may not be necessary), and it's possible to have the whole root filesystem stored in one file on a FAT32 filesystem, so the .exe could create the root filesystem (maybe something like a base debian or gentoo install), put everything in place, change how the machine boots, and restart.

Do not use this unless you know what you're doing

[e_AltF4]

>5. Make sure that the first 40MB of space on your hard drive is not being actively used. ...
I'm afraid that is NOT a trivial thing in 99.9% of all machines

Dead Rat

[lunenburg]

Dead Rat? OMG! I get it! It's like you took "Red Hat" and changed some letters around, and now it's like insulting!

That's what makes it funny!!!!111

Re:Do not use this unless you know what you're doi

[sparkes]

"upgrading" from one OS to another is never trivial.

I would think that on most i386 systems running linux the first 40mb or so is /boot or swap.

Swap is a simple case of swapoff then setting it up again in the freebsd setup (perhaps using the old /boot?)

and /boot is going bye bye anyway.

As a confirmed debian user (running it across multiple platforms) I wouldn't use this anyway and would suggest any user looking for a clean upgrade to a BSD from GNU/Linux would be better off backing up /home and other stuff that you want to survive the upgrade (/var/www perhaps) and nuking the whole thing using OpenBSD. If you are 'upgrading' from GNU/Linux to a BSD at least make it the safest variant ;-)

Not really an upgrade....

[bobthemuse]

So all this does is write to the boot partition and load a barebones copy of bsd on a ramdisk? Not terribly impressive. Now if there was a script which could make a list of my RH packages, backup all my config files, generate an BSD install script, then most importantly, intelligently copy my config files from their old RH default location to the new BSD location, then I would be impressed.

Not really difficult, just time consuming. Of course, this assumes the RH system was installed through packages only, would break on most anything compiled, but the script described above would be a start.

Forget depenguinator, I want reverse defenestrator

[phr1]

Reverse defenestration, throwing windows out of your computer. Where do I download? (Props to Eric for definition).

Can't we all just get along?

[Junior J. Junior III]

What's up with BSD "demonizing" linux like that?

Actually, it's a fairly neat hack, even if the rivalry is somewhat silly.

excellent!

[kevin lyda]

this is a good thing for linux and bsd. it would be nice to see a dedemonizer to go with it. this shows to people what "open systems" REALLY can be.

Re:Can we have the DeSCOinator now?

[Valdrax]

Well, it's not quite what you're looking for, but I have written a shell script to remove all offending SCO IP from Linux based on the evidence presented so far:

#!/bin/sh

I hope everyone finds this helpful.

Re:does FreeBSD have something like apt-get or yum

[molnarcs]

"having to do a make world on 300 boxen"

Not any more, and 'make world' is being deprecated in favor of 'make buildworld'. The difference is, that 'make buildworld' is totally self contained. You do 'make buldworld' on one machine, export /usr/obj (and /usr/src as well?) as nfs, mount it on your 300 boxen, and you only need to install the shiny new bsd with 'make installworld'. That's it. So it is actually quite easy to deploy on a large server farm. You would go the same way with the ports btw: build on one machine and have it make pakcages, than install the packages with pkg_add -r whatever on the rest of the machines. Neat. :)

Re:Upgrade? Sheesh.

[acidbass]

The worst example I ever saw was on IRC; a jackass said "yeah, if you're stupid you should use Linux, but once you really understand UNIX you should use BSD".

Hey! I said that!

Re:Let me get this straight...

[swb]

In the FreeBSD Ports collection, there are many Ports marked as broken, and many more unmaintained and suffering from bit-rot.

Name any five that depend on each other and are important for real-world use? Ports suffers from both the desire to be large and from the fact that they're generally supported by one person. I've been running FreeBSD now for nearly 5 years and have only run into a broken port once, snmpd, which broke after a significant change in system variables, which in turn broke snmpd. It was fixed quickly, and since then every time I've built a port it's built.

How exactly is FreeBSD 5 a "dramatic step-up from ANY Linux distro"? FreeBSD releases are only supported for 12 months. Then you have to upgrade. In comparison, Debian supports its releases for at least two years, and RHEL offers a whopping FIVE years. That's right, five. This matters in real-world use.

You don't understand FreeBSD releases. There are point releases (eg, 5.2), -STABLE branches and -CURRENT branches. Most people track a -STABLE branch. Tracking a stable branch provides you with bug fixes and occasionally some new features backported from -CURRENT. Tracking -STABLE requires you to periodically rebuild the system from source, but this is FreeBSD's *advantage* -- it's a single, coherent system that can be easily and totally recompiled from up-to-date source code.

I've been running 4-STABLE now for almost 4 years and its still a supported (ie, active development and maintenance) branch of FreeBSD. The 2.2 and 3 STABLE branches are still there and I think 3 was still supported until the 5-STABLE branch was created.

Maintaining FreeBSD is easy if you track -STABLE and supported for years, and its often possible (albeit not necessarily recommnede) to upgrade from one major release to another -- I did it from 3.x to 4.x. In this manner (and not just point RELEASEs), FreeBSD revisions are suppported for years -- far longer than even most sane people would run a given revision of software.

I never did more chasing than I did trying to keep Dead Rat systems updated; either I used RPMs and prayed that the package author didn't decide to switch a bunch of compilation options, or a built packages from source, which meant I had to do my own porting. And then there was libc upgrades and all other manner of horror of trying to maintain an OS that was a kernel with a bunch of other stuff glued on without any coherency.

I'll grant some Linux distros have better turnkey desktop setups, and certainly greater corporate involvement (although ask yourself when "greater corporate involvement" and "better software" were part of the same sentence), and higher visibility.

But longer suppport, easier maintenance and reliability over the long haul? No way.

Linux as a server

[shani]

Interestingly, the k root name server has been running Debian Linux for a year or two now and has not had any "creak". It gets about 1500 queries/second per machine (the root server is distributed geographically via anycasting, and at each site by load balancing), and receives all manner of ill-formed packets.

Other root servers seem to run Linux (use nmap if you're curious), but I don't know the people running them so I can't be sure.

Now admittedly this is a very specific type of service: it's a single application that all fits into memory.

We're going to be moving www.ripe.net and whois.ripe.net from Solaris to Linux in 2004. The WWW server gets about 20 hits/second as you can see here, and the whois server gets around 28 hits/second as you can see here. These have more complex usage, with disk I/O, new process creation, and so on. I wouldn't let these services migrate if I thought they would be unstable.

Re:Just mount_msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt/camera, easy

[fubar1971]

Correct! If by "just works" you mean:
1. load the driver from the supplied cd (where is that damn thing)
2. reboot
3. recover from blue screen of death
4. reboot in 'safe mode' (thanks MS, for protecting me from evil!)
5. Remove outdated, incompatable driver
6. Spend six hours reading forums and newsgroups about other users experience with how the device failed for them, and what they did.
7. Hunt down an obscure driver that is not intended for use with your device, but will give you some functionality without conflicting with your other drivers.
8. Download and install driver from a less than reputable source
9. Watch a worm run rampant through your system
10. Finally learn your lesson and install Linux or buy a Mac


I am definetily no fan of WinBlows. I use linux everyday. Unfortunately, installing *new* hardware on Linux can be just as inconveinent as any othe OS.

The same thing can be said about most Linux distros as well....

1. find the driver on some obscure website or news group.
2. Recompile the kerenel to include the driver(Damn it has errors)
3. Fix code problems
4. Recompile
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4
6. Write patch for incompaitable gcc version
7. Repeat steps 3 and 4
8. Restart with new kernel
9. kernel panic
10. reboot old kernel
11. Remove incorrectly compiled kernel.
12. Spend six hours reading forums and newsgroups about other users experience with how the device failed for them, and what they did.
14. Download and install beta or (shudder alpha level)driver.
15. Repeat steps 2 - 12
16. Compile driver as loadable module.
17. Repeat steps 3 - 7
18. Start Daemon or reboot
19. Kernel Panic
20. Reboot in 'interactive mode', 'different run level' or 'using emergency boot media'
21. Remove loadable module
22. spend 6months writing your own driver
23. Overlook security flaw in your own code.
24. Watch your box get r00t'ed.
22. Finally learn your lesson and install Windows or buy a Mac.

Those that live in glass houses should not throw stones.

Ok, I give up. You win.

[Qbertino]

I actually thought I was being funny and expected to be moderated that way.
But moderating me and especially that post 'Insightful' takes the cake. I give up.
And thus hereby offically anounce: Credit for the biggest 'Funny' goes to Mr. '+1 Insightfull' modder. :-)