[PATCH] mkinitrd rescue mode

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 03:31:42PM -0400, Peter Jones wrote:
> > It would also give people the ability to try to rescue corrupted root
> > filesystems without needing special infrastructure (like a PXE server) 
> > and without having to physically be near the machine (with a CD boot).
> 
> This is a strawman -- your scenario is that they've just installed or
> upgraded, in which case they've already set up this infrastructure or
> are already close to the box.

I don't understand why you think that everyone should be running a PXE
server, which can be a security nightmare as well as an administrative
hassle.

The following is a real-world, though perhaps ill-advised, configuration:

 o /boot on RAID1 across several /dev/sd?1
 o  swap on RAID1 across several other /dev/sd?1
 o Everything else on LVM2-over-RAID5 on /dev/sd?2

[As disks have gotten larger and cheaper, putting the root file system on
 RAID5 has become less attractive, but people still do it.]

A disk failure followed by a crash/outage requires manual intervention to
bring the RAID5 back online, since we do not have RAID5 journaling yet,
and it is still early days for RAID6.  Getting to a command prompt and
running mdadm to reassemble the array would certainly be quite useful.

	-Bill