RE: chapter about using the fixit floppy?

[Gardner Buchanan]

On 04:40:42 John Reynolds wrote:
 
 Is there a chapter of the Handbook that details how to use the "fixit"
 floppy?
 

I just recently had an "interesting" fixit experience as well.
Device entries are just part of it.  I think a general outline of
the "fixit" environment is needed, together with a description of
how to handle some common tasks in the environment.

The Fixit environment is sufficiently bizarre that even a seasoned
UNIX pro will likely have trouble figuring things out.  This is
complicated a little by there being three distinct Fixit environments
that vary wildly:

 o  Holographic Fixit shell,
 o  Fixit Diskette, and
 o  CD Fixit.

I'd like to see a "Fixit" section somewhere under "Advanced
Topics".  It might have a couple of sentences about single user mode,
but mostly discuss Fixit environments.

It would deal with the three main environments.  For each, outlining

 o  what gets mounted where,
 o  where your shell is chroot'ed to (if anywhere),
 o  what things are in the path and what they're capable of, and
 o  how to carry out some basic tasks

The example tasks might be:

 o  doing a disklabel/newfs
 o  installing boot blocks
 o  restoring a dump
 o  fixing an fstab

John's experiences would fit somewhere into this I'm sure.

I'd like to give something like this a go, unless there is already
material in place that I don't know about.  Any suggestions about
topics that I've missed?  Pointers to source materials?

See you,


Gardner Buchanan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.


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chapter about using the fixit floppy?

[John Reynolds]

[ cc'ing to -hackers because some content may be relavent outside -doc ]
Hello all,

Is there a chapter of the Handbook that details how to use the "fixit" floppy?

I moved a disk from controller to controller yesterday and in doing so rendered
my system unbootable (ad4 went to ad0, fstab is hosed, ooops) because I forgot
to change /etc/fstab before shutting down. Rather than just temporarily putting
the controller back, rebooting, changing /etc/fstab then moving it again I
decided to get some worth out of those CDs I bought (grin :), get my hands
dirty, and use the "fixit" option.

IMO, it seems like the "fixit" shell one is given via this option (and I
suppose by using the "fixit.flp" image) is more difficult to "use" than it
should be.

I don't profess to be the expert-of-all-gods in FreeBSD but I've sysadmin'ed
SunOS boxes and been dorking with FreeBSD since 2.0.5, so I wouldn't consider
myself a "newbie" to Unix. Still, it took me a while before I was able to mount
my root partition so I could edit the lousy etc/fstab file. 

I knew the partition I wanted was ad0s1a but there was no device file for this
partition in /dev or /dist/dev (aka /mnt2/dev I believe). So, I copied over
MAKEDEV from /dist/dev and after seeing reference to using the $MAKEDEVPATH
variable I was able to get MAKEDEV to work with a single edit--mknod is hard
coded in there as /sbin/mknod but inside the "fixit" shell, mknod is reached
through /mnt2/sbin/mknod (there were other trivialities like symlinking
/dist/etc/group to /etc/group so mknod wouldn't complain about the group
'operator' not existing, etc.).

So, my questions are two-fold:

 1) Can we/shouldn't we populate the CD's /dev with every entry that could be
created with MAKEDEV (including all the partitions that can be within
slices of a disk)? If that were the case, then all I would have had to do
was "mount -t ufs /mnt2/dev/ad0s1a /whatever" and went about my business
editing. 

 2) If this is NOT a good thing to do, can we/should we make MAKEDEV not point
to /sbin/mknod but rather to something in the path? At that point it should
be trivial to write a section of the handbook detailing that all somebody
needs to do to make devices is:

  cd /dev
  MAKEDEVPATH=$PATH; export MAKEDEVPATH
  sh /mnt2/dev/MAKEDEV whatever0

and they could then begin the business of fixing what needed fixing.

If populating the CD's (and/or fixit floppy's) /dev with all known devices
isn't the correct thing to do, I can provide patches to MAKEDEV if that's the
correct route as well as a section for the handbook (at least in ASCII--I'll
need help sgml'ing it). I'm looking for input from people. Perhaps it was just
too late last night and I'm being dense (i.e. is the "fixit" procedure really
this 'difficult' to use). Comments?

Thanks,

-- 
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John Reynolds Chandler Capabilities Engineering, CDS, Intel Corporation
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  My opinions are mine, not Intel's. Running
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  FreeBSD 3.5-STABLE. FreeBSD: The Power to Serve.
http://members.home.com/jjreynold/  Come join us!!! @ http://www.FreeBSD.org/
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