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?

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.

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.