Success! And a rescue adventure

[jws]

I finally managed to configure the bubba2 (now renamed "antares") as a drop-in replacement for my old (laptop) home gateway server ("procyon").

And I did drop it in, and indeed it functions very well as a replacement. Now to explore the more advanced possibilities of the bubba2 (network storage, overnight torrent downloading, etc.).

At the last moment an almost-disaster occurred. I noticed a thing called ifplugd and thought: WTH? My debian desktop ("vega") doesn't run this, nor does procyon, why should it be necessary? So I cheerfully typed

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update-rc.d -f ifplugd remove

Mistake. Antares became inaccessible even after a restart. Lots of hours of configuration work down the drain.. the horror.

So now to the rescue stick. Set install, format, partitioning, setting the time, all to zero. Installed a dhcp server (udhcpd) on vega. In its config, offered a range of "leases" from 192.168.1.20 to 192.168.1.40 (on the same subnet that I normally use with static addresses). Pulled plug on antares (reset button did not work). Put stick in, kept button pressed for 5 seconds after putting plug back in.

The light never stopped flashing. Obviously the operation had failed. Out of a sense of gallows humour I tried pinging 192.168.1.20 through the WAN interface. Amazingly the pings came back. Then SSH'd to that address with password "excito". This also worked. You arrive in a strange desert. The command

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ls

shows nothing; that's because you are root, and root's home directory is empty on the rescue system.

Then cd / followed by ls revealed a directory called /mnt, with two subdirectories: usb and disk. usb contained my usb stick. disk was empty. After

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cd /
mount -t ext3 /mnt/disk /dev/sda1

the system part of the machine became available. /mnt/disk/home existed but was empty; mount -t ext3 /mnt/disk/home /dev/sda2 did not succeed. But that was OK, because I only wanted to change things in /mnt/disk/etc: the startup links in the rc*.d directories. This I did. Restarted the machine (probably I had to pull the plug first, can't remember). Put network cable back to LAN interface. The machine was revived.

The bubba2 "user manual", such as it is, says the "rescue" operation is the same as the "complete wipe and restore" operation. So one would expect that after a successful rescue the light would stop blinking. But it never does. The user manual should have a better description of the "rescue" feature. But it does work.

[carl]

About the ifplugd, that is a process that keeps control over the ethernet connections and enables/disables ethernet connections and eventual dhcp requests when the network cable is removed/added.

The rescue stick does only a complete wipe if "install" is enabled, otherwise it will just stop and keep an SSH channel open to enable people to log in and "hack". We are in the process of updating the manual at the moment to describe the new rescue option better as it is a rather new feature.

/Carl