Topic: Assistance Desperately Needed

[James Douglas]

Hi all, hopefully someone can assist me in recovering an esmith installation with problems.

History
friend got esmith installed and running on a toshiba magnia internet appliance for his small law office. No vga, or local ports only a 7port switch built into the unit so all admin is through windows shares, ssh or web admin. No prbs for about 6 months.

Problem
today he calls me in a panic server is down. wont give out dhcp addresses and he's power cycled the appliance several times and no luck. Got my hands on it and it wont boot as he said. I hear the hard disk spinning and booting up but it stops and i cannot connect to it via ip through ssh, or web admin. Of course usual story no data backups and needs the thing back online asap.

Questions
what is the best way to recover this system? i cannot boot in the same hardware (amd 400mhz, 64mb ram) and system wont boot in my xp1200+ machine kernel panic error. My options are: get it to boot into another system (?), boot off another esmith drive and try to mount this one as a slave, image the drive to another and see if there are disk errors preventing bootup(?).

Please any insight would be most helpful...

[Michael Smith]

What I'd do is Ghost the install to another drive so I could experiment with it, then put the newly Ghosted drive into another machine & run an "upgrade" install either with the same version or a later version of e-smith.

[james douglas]

i see your point on the ghosting, problem is i cant really do an reinstall over bec its in a machine that has no video/kybd/mouse ports ie internet appliance.

The image was built originally by someone who had modded an appliance and added those ports onto it and built the image for others to use.

Other suggestions, ex can I boot off another install and mount the orig drive and run diags on it fscheck etc?

[Bill Pflaumer]

You can try http://www.knoppix.org, download the ISO, burn it to a cdrom and use it to boot the system from the new cdrom. Read up about it at knoppix.org and knoppix.net. This self booting cdrom may save his ass. Also goto http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/ to read up on data recovery using knoppix. The software is out of this world.

Report back your results and backup your data next time.

Bill

[Bill Pflaumer]

James ,
I missed the part where U said no mouse,kybd,or video. I would take the drive to a sys that has the above three devices and boot your knoppix from cd and mount the drive from the knoppix desktop. U should see the drive from the knoppix desktop. Right click and mount.

Bill

[james douglas]

LOL thx bill for the advice. I was dlaoding the latest knoppix as i read your post. How about suggestions for next steps. Im assuming ill get the drive mounted ok, fscheck it? then try to reboot it in the appliance? Anyone give me the full command to run some diags on the drive?

[Nathan Fowler]

Bill thanks for the link, that software looks pretty sweet.  Downloading it now.

[Michael Smith]

Why knock yourself out trying to get the install working again in the appliance?  Get it working in an inexpensive PC and forget about the appliance!  As you've found out, they're great until there's a problem.

[ryan]

Thats why they make KVM switches....put lots of appliances or PCs on a single Monitor/keyboard/mouse.  I agree with Michael, get something you have control of.  

I have saved my butt twice with knoppix....it is a wonderful tool to send your data from a busted system over the network to a nice safe place...be it from a windows box or a linux box. It is just plain amazing what that one CD lets you do.

ryan

[Bill Pflaumer]

James,
I would first try and save the data, mount the corrupted drive , create a share on a windows pc on the network , and use LinNeighborhood (Read the Shock Family Tutorial about disaster recovery, the link is in a previous post). I'm no expert with Linux, so I'm not sure of all the steps you should take after recoving data. Maybe some Linux guru can step in and suggest how to proceed.

Best of Luck,
Bill

[Michael Smith]

Rereading this thread I am struck by the assumption made when this appliance was installed that it would never have problems.  The install image was generated on a hacked box that had VGA & keyboard ports?  Amazing!  Did y'all think this machine would just keep on running forever?  Or that one day you'd get an email:  "Hi, this is your Toshiba Magnia:  I'm going to fall over dead in a week so I'd be thinking about replacing me if I were you"????  Putting e-smith on an appliance is a neat hack but I'd never in a million years trust that rig for a production server!

Machines fail.  Be prepared.  I agree that six months is quite a short life but these things happen.

I would still yank the drive out of that thing, stick it in a PC and do an "upgrade" with a version same as or more recent than the version that was there.  That should take care of the hardware changes.  I'd still recommend using Ghost or another drive copy utility to make a working copy so recovery efforts don't destroy it utterly.

Then set them up with a PC as a server!  After you get the office up & running, you can put the drive back in the Magnia, restore whatever OS came with it & use it as backup storage, if you like.

[James Douglas]

There are plenty of people in these forums running "unorthodox" hardware and software on machines that are important in some way or another. They come here looking for advice and assistance not criticism and attitude.

[Michael Smith]

Consider the attitude a bonus.  I'd be no more sympathetic if I heard about someone who bumped his head as a result of driving a car with bald tires & no brakes; probably less so, as that person could've hurt others by his carelessness.

I stand by my advice.  What's happened with your setup sinced your initial post?  I am actually interested to hear how this works out.  

I actually reserve my most pointed criticism for your friend in the law office with no backups.  Putting your professional life on one machine without regular backups is just asking for it.  I'm not the most assiduous backer-upper in my personal life but you better believe my invoices & accounting files are stored redundantly with offsite copies!

Now, of course, having said all this I'm no doubt due for a tornado to pick up my entire office and home and smash everything to splinters.  *knocks wood, clutches lucky rabbit's foot*

[James Douglas]

I want to thank everyone for their advice on this. Heres the result:

-ghosted drive to another as precaution
-booted drive in a pc off a knoppix cd
-ran a fsck on the partitions and fixed errors
-placed drive into appliance and it booted right up.

Im going to add a kybod, monitor and mouse ports to one of these appliances and keep it around so i can drop a drive into it and see whats going on realtime.

thx again for the support in these forums. You guys rock...

[Michael Smith]

Excellent!  Glad it worked out.  I assume your lawyer friend will be doing regular backups of some sort now?