True Stories of Knoppix Rescues

Omniscientist writes "We've all been there: Our system is on the edge of death and we need to either fix it or retrieve important data that still remains hidden away in its dying clutches. LinuxDevCenter has a funny article on a heroic tale of a sysadmin relying on Knoppix to save the day. I for one, always make a boot disk in case of problems, but Knoppix can turn a bad day into a good one for just about anyone. Perhaps every administrator should have a Knoppix CD on reserve."

Comments

Offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

but how is this story "Hardware Hacking"?

Re:Well...

[Blue-Footed Boobie]

...maybe FDISK it?

I agree, but...

[schmobag]

...what's with the "Perhaps..."? IMHO, some kind of linux rescue cd is a sysadmin must-have.

Re:what a coincedence

[superpulpsicle]

I have never needed to rely on knoppix. For every major failure, I just use the setup installation OS CDs to boot.

Knoppix to the rescue

[Storm]

I always keep multiple Knoppix CDs in my laptop bag, plus a couple of variants. I have two of the latest, one for emergencies, and one for Linux evangelism...Plus, when I was toting a Powerbook, I had to have a Mac Knoppix.

In addition, being a security engineer, I always have a copy of Auditor and a Knoppix STD "in case of emergency." Hey, you never know when you will be called on to...er, penetrate.

Re:Why is this a story?

[BaldGhoti]

Oh, come on, like you've never fouled anything up the first time you tried to play with it.

Re:Why is this a story?

[compro01]

yes, but everyone does something profoundly stupid every once in awhile.

Knoppix is good for fixing the problem, regardless of whether the problem was caused by an ID10T error or an OS crash.

Just this morning

[blueforce]

Just this morning, mozingod had to come rescue my win2k workstation with knoppix to reset the local admin password.

*Somehow* my machine got deleted off of an AD domain so I coulnd't log on. Everything's been running so smooth with this machine - no, seriously - that no one, me included, knew the local admin password.

Knoppix to the rescue, 13 reboots later, I'm back in and the new admin password is 'asdf'.... I mean... it's really long and... un-crackable....

Re:Knoppix used to save WIn98

[Stephen Samuel]

I had a bit more luck. My roommate moved in with an NT-2000 box, that she couldn't remember the password to (It'd been in storage for a while). I resized the partition, and installed Knoppix... It was months later that I found a tool to replace the NT passwords, but by that time she had gotten used to knoppix.

This weekend she asked me to toast the NT partition alltogether (once we replace her fried power supply). I'm sooo proud of her!

For your sister, ask her for permission to set aside about 5GB for a knoppix partition, Tell her it's a backup for the next time windows gets virus-infected, so she has SOMETHING to work with no matter what... then encourage her to play with it so that she's accustomed to the system in the case of an emergency.

Re:My dead drive

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a slave drive with about 4GB of family photos ... Irreplacable

Come on dude, burn a couple of Cds already. It won't take long or cost much. Two copies of the data in different places is always safer than one.

Re:Knoppix - a lifesaver

[krbvroc1]

Dude, it's the freaking WWW. You should have implicit permission to link to the front page of ANY site, and there's a good argument that if you put anything in the publicly accessible space, then it should be able to be linked to.

Dude, it's called being nice. It can be rude to link to a site and let them be slashdotted without asking them if their servers can handle it. We aren't talking about an site designed for high bandwidth; they offload their ISO downloads to a few mirrors and bittorrent. In addition these guys are overseas in Germany. I didn't want to be responsible for their bandwidth costs to skyrocket.

Seriously, grow some cojones and a brain, and realize that they might WANT you to link to them.
Well since I didn't ask them if their server could handle the load, I err'd on the side of kindness. Apparently you prefer to assume 'they might WANT' to be slashdotted.

Re:My dead drive

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude.. BACKUPS.. repeat after me.. BACK... UPS... BACKUPS...

Get the picture (no pun intended)?

I have no data anywhere on any system that isn't backed up at least once every 24 hours.

If you use Mac or Unix, it's easy to use rsync to make backups. On some client machines I run it every hour for easy cheap backups. If you're clever with hard links you can also do incremental backups or multiple backups with shared copies of common files.

But anyway.

BACKUPS. If you have good backups, the Knoppix CD is irrelevant.

Re:HOWTO: Recovering the root Password

[SpaceLifeForm]

Caution on your fix to /etc/shadow. First, it's much easier to just edit the file and clear the password field. Secondly, your procedure could fail to make the shadow file usable (for root) if in fact the shadow file is not using DES encryption, but using a modern encryption such as AES. SuSE-9.2 supports that by default. So cut-and-pasting a DES password field into a file expected to contain an AES password is not going to solve the problem of an unknown password.