this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
597 points (98.5% liked)

linuxmemes

20880 readers
5 users here now

I use Arch btw

Sister communities:

Community rules

  1. Follow the site-wide rules and code of conduct
  2. Be civil
  3. Post Linux-related content
  4. No recent reposts

Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
597
What can I say, I didn't want to wait on my provider lol (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
46 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

It was also actually pretty fun!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 36 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I had a server I rented from a provider in a data center and I wanted to image (dd) the drive for archival before I decommissioned it from my infrastructure.

Normally, you can't really do that with the OS running and you would have to shut down and insert a live USB or something and temporarily boot from that. The server being a faraway rental the only option was to open a ticket so that they could enable an out-of-band management option like KVM or IPMI. Which would allow you to control a machine as if you had a physical monitor, keyboard and mouse in front of you. With that you can attach flash drives, shutdown, restart, see the POST/BIOS/UEFI screens etc remotely .

But, I didn't want to wait 6-8 hours for them to enable that so instead I put together a process that would "boot" me into another distro "installed" into a RAM disk (kinda like how live CD/USB works) from the currently installed and running OS without rebooting

From there I could unmount the boot disk and do what ever I wanted from there, I could have even wiped the disk entirely and installed a entirely different distro if I wanted

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

How do you do that? What minimal distro did you use? Did you make it yourself? How reliable is pivot-root? How many tries did it take you to do that successfully?