Slashdot Mirror
What Live CDs Do You Carry Around?
TPC asks: "I recently acquired a small CD case that fits 12 CDs. I figured that it would be useful to always carry around a few CDs to use when helping others with computer issues, or in case something goes wrong with my own computer. However, I'm having a hard time deciding what CDs to pick, and there are probably many hidden gems out there. I'm sure I'm not the first person with this idea, so I ask you: What 12 live (and otherwise) CDs would you carry around?"
For me my number 1 disc is Knoppix or Wikipedia Article
After that's its a disc with common hardware drivers, Java 1.5, Eclipse, Apache, MySql and PHP
All the worlds indeed a
minipe is a must for windows installs
knoppix is a must for linux
keep a fedora boot cd (or other common platforms in your line of work)
windows XP install cd (for recovery- or substitute with appropriate windows server version)
You can probably get away with those and the boot cds for any OS you are likely to work on (Solaris install cd, IRIX insttools, whatever)
"Different Stages" by Rush... but that's obviously not what you mean.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
My favourites are Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Damnsmalllinux.org, and the Ultimate Boot CD [which my Dad loves for the hard disk utilities].
I plan on ordering Ubuntu discs from ShipIt, and handing them out at the Vista launch event on January 9th.
Oh You POS
mandatory tool to have in your toolkit if you deal with Windows machines.
How we know is more important than what we know.
For Windows emergency repairs: A CD made with Bart's Prebuild Environment
For Mac OS X emergency repairs, a Mac OS X bootable disk
For everything else, a bootable Linux disk with the tools I think I need that day.
For general use, TheOpenCD. This also has a Windows partition so I can show my XP-loving friends the joys of Free-as-in-beer-and-liberty software.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Kill disk which simply has very advanced (read:paranoid) data destruction techniques (read:write lots of 0's over and over then replace with 1's) for when you need your entire hard drive wiped in about 10 minutes for when the riaa knocks down your door because you have a 1 TB array of hard drives serving free mp3s to small children.
Ultimate Boot CD
Knoppix
Damn Small Linux
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Knoppix
Never know when you need to pull files from a disk with a FUBAR boot sector
AV Disc
Need your disk with AVAST, Ad-Aware, and other virus removal tools
Windows XP
Sometimes a re-install is just easier
Fedora
Just in case you have an open-minded subject prone to viruses, you can get them using Linux. (Of course, this takes multiple disc spaces.)
MS Office
To fix those pesky Office corruptions
Open Office
Once again, for those open-minded folks who wouldn't really know the difference anyway.
Misc software
Adobe, Quicktime, Firefox, Opera, J2RE, etc. Those pretty much handle any random computer problems most people have.
It is certainly different for me nowadays. I used to always carry around boot discs and driver discs of various descriptions. Installation of software is a much less risky process since the advent of Win2K/XP, and with safe mode, the likelihood of not being able to boot a computer is much reduced.
Also, with near-ubiquitous internet access these days, the chances of not having a critical driver is almost zero. And any particularly hard to get drivers I keep on my laptop.
So now I pretty much just keep blank CDs/DVDs with me, and make backups of important data if I'm installing hardware.
Here's what I have in my CD case, in approximate order of how regularly use them...
Memtest86--because the RAM in the cheap PCs I come across sucks. Some of the other tool CDs have this one as well, I like to get the latest one regularly here. Good for stress testing, and even handy for figuring out things like whether the RAM is running correctly in dual-channel mode.
SystemRescueCD--I particularly like the partition editor and imaging utilities. Been weaning myself off Partition Magic/Drive Image even for Windows work with these two.
Ubuntu live CD and DVD. The CD works in more systems, the DVD version is a completely usable system with a lot of stuff in it. What most impresses me about the Ubuntu live disc is that I can download packages over the network and install them, even thing that run as services, from the live environment. I actually got PostgreSQL installed and some database tests completed, all without a single Postgres file on the media.
Knoppix--Some days, your first choice in Linux live CDs just doesn't work on a random machine; that's why I still carry around this one as a backup.
Bart PE--A bit of a pain to build the first time, but very handy for fixing Windows machines.
Offline NT Password & Registry Editor--this one has been less useful lately, as I've been running into NTFS partitions it really doesn't want to write to. My fallback position is to use this to generate a new SAM file, then copy it over with a BartPE disc.
RedHat Enterprise 3 and 4 CDs. While not technically live CDs, you can do a lot with booting into this environment, and I deal with enough people running RedHat versions that they're worth carrying around. I still keep one of the older versions around so I have something running the 2.4 kernel to tests against; occasionally I'll run into some old hardware that 2.6 pukes on, while 2.4 still works great.
Knoppix is my personal favorite, but I deal with a lot of linux/unix x86 hardware which can be easily fixed using this software.
However if you deal with Windows systems, look to keep "The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows" in you list. http://www.ubcd4win.com/
LinuxDefender Live is also another good one to have.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Slayer's Decade of Aggression Live two CD set.
Someone hates these cans.
I keep a CD of Kanotix around at all times. It's a Knoppix variant, but I find that Kanotix has a cleaner look and feel. It's also better for a HD install, since it uses only Debian-unstable packages instead of the mix of testing and unstable that Knoppix uses.
However, I'm going to my parents' home for the Xmas holidays, so I'll be using their WinXP machine. I happened to have a USB flash drive lying around, so I packed it with portable FOSS Win32 packages from , including FireFox, Thunderbird, GIMP, OpenOffice etc. These packages install everything, including dlls, into an application folder and are executed directly from the USB drive. The added benefit is that you can copy these packages from machine to machine simply by copying the application folders; there is no need to run an installer every time or alter the Registry.
For me, there's one disk. It's a beast. It's also of questionable legality. That being said, when shit hits the fan i don't mind if 'legal' and i are on opposite sides of the fence at zero hour. Nobody cares when their servers aren't working. Note, this isn't a link, just a good description (so you can find it yourself... hint: newsgroups)
Hiren's Boot CD
I have USB stick loaded with WinPE for cleanup or maintenance tasks.
Great album. Won't help much with fixing your Mom's computer though.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
No, it is bootable but the live bit is because you can run a live OS directly from the CD. Not just boot the machine into DOS but have everything from web browsers to office suites.
Common sense is not so common
Pretty much. It's also sometimes more specifically used to describe Linux distros you can download and burn to a CD and then boot off of... sort of a try before you install to the HD dealie. Not that you HAVE to install to the HD. In this case, LiveCDs can be useful for computer recovery.
I have to use a Knoppix LiveCD every time I have to reinstall Windows, which will erase grub, for instance. From there I can reinstall grub and regain my triple-boot-ability.
I carry a bootable 1gb USB drive
I do not carry diagnostics on a USB flash drive. In an instant they can be silently corrupted without you knowing. They don't have a write protect. That alone makes them unusable to carry from client to client. You need idiot proof diagnostic media so an accidental reboot does not permit the worm on a system from hitching a ride with you to your next client. I only permit write protected media for all my diagnostics. A floppy with the write tab punched out or glued open, a single closed session CDR, or DVD is OK, but a writable USB drive is not OK to use by service people at my site.
The truth shall set you free!
I currently carry around with me:
:)
Kororaa XGL live CD v0.3 and 0.2
There is nothing better than to show off the power of Linux to your friends and the non believers. 0.3 is only ATI cards at the moment, while 0.2 supports both. People are usually impressed by this.
Backtrack 1.0
The best in security analysis live cd's.
Damn Small Linux
Good for older machines
Offline NT Password and Registry Editor
Always good to have when people forget their admin password or something on a windows machine...
Auditor Security collection from the backtrack people. I still have this around because it supports a bit more hardware than backtrack did
Knoppix
Good when you are at public terminals and are kinda paranoid...
I also carry around various install cd's for recent versions of linux.
No, seriously... whenever a system crashes, you can pop it in, and BAM - you get the certain knowledge that, no matter how bad things might be, you're at least one step above absolute rock bottom.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
I have a couple lying around, but the one I always pull out is grml. It's focused on text tools --"linux for sysadmins" I think is the phrase they use. It's booted on everything I ever tried it on and has good support for wireless cards. Plus they can fit a lot more on a cd by skipping KDE, and it boots so much faster than knoppix.
No, I'm not retarded.
I carry around Knoppix and the Ultimate Boot CD on USB thumb drives.
I most recently booted a multi-terabyte server off the Knoppix thumb drive to run memtest overnight in an attempt to track down some hardware flakiness.
UBCD is a lifesaver for borked Windows machines.
Ubuntu is the best end-user live CD I've seen. It works well on my laptop, even getting wireless right.
--Pat
I carry Finnix. It's a 100MB livecd with no X, but a command-line interface and a lot of tools for the sysadmin in mind. LVM autodetection, very quick boot (remember, no X), niche network utilities like vconfig/mii-diag/iptraf/etc. Memtest86+ via the boot menu of course. It even has a freedos boot profile for when you need to flash a BIOS.
:)
Oh, and I'm kinda required to carry Finnix, since I'm the author. Oops
DBAN is crucial. I carry one everywhere to make sure that retired machines and hard drives don't tell their secrets to the world..
Viper is the preferred editor of the Emacs operating system.
Rather than try to build a be-all, end all pack I take what's needed for the job. We have a big rack of CDs at work with all our various recovery and maintenance tools, there's at least 30 CDs in that category. However for a given problem it's unlikely to need more than a couple. So I bring what I'll probably need. Just ask the person first. Same deal when I consult. For example last night I got a call for a system that couldn't run Office and AOL at the same time and was performing poorly. That tells me I need anti-spyware tools, Windows system examination tools (like the Sysinternals utilities) and Office service packs. I'm not going to need any live CDs, clearly the system is operational. In the end, Process Explorer was the only tool needed (a program was leaking memory and the system has little of it).
Do your homework first, and you don't need to bring so much with you.
For problems serious enough that I'd want to boot form a live CD, I generally don't do service on site. I take the computer with me where I can hook it up and have access to any and all tools I might need, including a working computer with Internet access. Major reason is that quite often the problem is disk failure. Well in that case I need the data backed up and fast. You do not want ot be trying that off a live CD on a potentially faulty machine. You want that disk in a computer you know is good, with good cooling on it, so you can quickly do a local copy of the important stuff (and the whole disk, if that works).
Unless you are doing work on computers at really remote locations, that's how I'd do it.
If you are just asking what kinds of CDs to have. Well, I dunno, depends on what you have access to, and how much time you are willing to spend. Off the top of my head the recovery CDs that get the most use at work are Windows PE, the Windows XP and 2000 install CDs, Knoppix, Memtest86+, Ghost (few different ones configured for different NICs), Spinrite, the Sysinternals tools, XP SP2/2K SP4/etc, the AV/anti-spyware USB stick (so it can be updated), drivers CDs for various hardware configurations, disk diags for various vendors, and Partition Magic. There's more, I just can't think of them now and those are the ones I probably use the most.
I agree with you about not using writeable media on dangerously untrustable systems, so your virus-cleaners and similar tools need to be read-only. There *are* some write-protectable flash drives these days - I think I've mainly seen them as Compact Flash, so you'd need a USB CF-card reader, but those are trivially cheap. However, CDROM media is basically free, and the person whose machine needed cleaning probably needs to have you leave them a copy :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Of course Knoppix is far and away the best Live CD in this area. But it's not great if you want something that can boot from a (reasonably sized) USB drive. Let me explain. I am a "Residential Computing Consultant" at the school I go to, which means that I troubleshoot student's computers, clean up after spyware and viruses, etc. At my job we are issued a 512 MB flash drive. The programs that we are _required_ to have on there (i.e. all the anti spyware, networking diagnostic, and especially Windows patches and hot fixes) take up at least 300 MB. With the remaining space I was able to install Slax and still have ~50 MB left to spare.
I went with Slax rather than something like DSL for a number of reasons. But the main one is that of all the really small live distros, it was the only one I could find with a 2.6 kernel, which translates to better hardware support for all of the weird computers I have to work on (they are mostly one or at most two years old).
We are encouraged to carry Knoppix CDs as well, and they are available in the office, but it's really, really nice to be able to have a live USB drive. Plus only a relatively small amount of the total software on a Knoppix CD is for data recovery and so forth, and all of the essential tools in this area are present in most of the small distros like Slax or DSL.
#include ".signature"
I used to carry BartPE and I still recommend it to budget-constrained folks. However, spending some money for Winternals was one of the best things my employer ever did. It boots faster, comes with more and better tools by default, and gives me the easy network awareness that makes it possible for me to do my job better.
On the free side, when trying to revive the virus-infested home computers of friends, I find Chronomium to be wonderful. You plug in a USB key with a current Clam AV signature file and boot from the disk. It then runs through the drive and deletes all virus-infected files. For a very quick "either fix it or pronounce it fully broken so we can start over" situation, it's without peer.
I'll buy that, but then your CD case is going to be mostly empty. No one respects you if you only have 4 CDs. Best to spread it out. Although I do appreciate Pink Floyd, I wouldn't be caught dead without Tool's 10,000 days in some form on my person. Dare I say they are the modern Pink Floyd. Or...they are the future Pink Floyd to the modern Pink Floyd that were ahead of their time in the past.