On Monday 28 February 2005 09:27 am, Brian Densmore wrote:
I am curious though how the re-install was accomplished, seeing as how you live here in the KC Metro and the machine is 1000+ miles away in AZ, IIRC.
Tucson, in fact. The manager at the ISP down there mounted the drive in a "spare" server running RH9 on VMWare, and gave me ssh access to it. I reformatted the partitions and used rsync to reinstall. It took many hours, even though it was only about 2.5G of data. I could have filtered it a little better and used compression to speed it up some, but with the low upstream bandwidth from RR it was just slow.
I did some altered file checks while I was booted to the other system, so in a way it was not unlike using Knoppix to have a known good starting point.
The drive was then re-mounted in the original server, and after yet ANOTHER round of fun with fstab - trailing slash on one of the devices - we got it up and running.
The fstab issue was frustrating, because when I had upgraded the hard drive (from 3G to 80G), I had switched from partition labels to device names. Unfortunately, when the drive arrived in Tucson, I did an rsync to catch any changes that occurred while the drive was in transit - and restored the fstab that used (now non-existant) labels! I took care of that on this drive swap, but a typo sank me anyway.
That's the kind of thing that can be tough when you have to do remote management.