this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
593 points (98.4% liked)

linuxmemes

21393 readers
1247 users here now

Hint: :q!


Sister communities:


Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
  • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
  • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
  •  

    Please report posts and comments that break these rules!


    Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't fork-bomb your computer.

    founded 1 year ago
    MODERATORS
     

    It was also actually pretty fun!

    you are viewing a single comment's thread
    view the rest of the comments
    [–] [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

    [–] [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?