Re: Etch to Lenny, two kernel options now, why?

On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 06:10:34PM +0100, ???????????????????? ??. ???????????????? wrote:
Quoth Douglas A. Tutty:
On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 01:39:51PM +0100, ???????????????????? ??. ???????????????? wrote:

There's and advantage to having some kind of static-linked shell (at
least). There used to be busybox static and now there's sash. You
would start it (and bypass the standard lib-dependant init scripts with
a kernel command line that contains:

init=/bin/sash

That's absolutely right. Combined with GRUB's ass-kicking ability to edit the
kernel command (actually, the whole freaking _boot-sequence_) on the fly, this
has saved my life a couple of times on all sorts of machines (I had this ***-up
in Gentoo once where glibc was FUBAR'ed and this came in really handy.)

Typically, though, you won't need that on a Debian system as a normal user. Most
people wouldn't be able to get their environment working in busybox (never tried
sash, thanks for the tip) - you have to mount proc and dev you have to load
modules, probably set the terminal keymap, get networking to run, etc. Not
that it's particularly hard, but it's not what you would do every day, so you
have to really konw your way around the system (and probably be able to use
Google).

I just run /etc/rcS.d/* one at a time with the "start" parameter. If I
get an error, then I work to fix it, then run the next script. To do
that, you need a shell. If the / filesystem is having trouble, you may
loose something in /lib and find it in lost+found

It shouldn't be needed, too, except you did something very kinky with your libs -
in which case most users would probably go for a reinstall instead of trying to
figure out what's broken and how to fix it.

Note that if your filesystem gets messed up and needs a manual fsck,
life gets interesting in debian. single-user mode requries that all
filesystems are mounted normally. That leaves init=/bin/sash.

The Etch installer image has a good rescue system that also gives you a
shell, as does GRML. It is handy to have everything you need ready to
boot. If you have more than one hard drive, its also handy to put a
minimal debian install on it selectable from grub (and put grub on both
disks and copy the /boot/grub/menu.lst). If one doesn't boot, boot the
other and fix. Of course, debian keeps taking more and more disk space.

Too bad we don't have anything like OpenBSD's bsd.rd (ramdisk) with full
tools to fix things right there in the ramdisk, bootable from the normal
boot loader.

Doug.


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