Re: mkinitrd update discussion/survey

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| 1)	I keep a busybox and basic tools on my /boot partition (/dev/hda1),
| 	and boot with root=/dev/hda1 init=/linuxrc.  my linuxrc will (first)
| 	e2fsck my root partition and then mount it (just seems like the
| 	right order to me, though most distros seem to disagree).  Also
| 	allows any kind of raid/encryption/nfs/whatever root to work
| 	much more easily than I've ever managed with an initrd.  And it
| 	might be useful just to offer an 'initpart' as a debugging tool,
| 	and once the bugs are out, make a ramdisk out of it.
Doesn't fsck complain if the filesystem to be checked is mounted?

| 2)	[ on pivot_root ]
| 3)	Although I have not yet entirely implemented it, I have always
| 	wanted to set up (especially my servers at the office) with
| 	busybox, basic tools, and dropbear sshd.  If e2fsck fails, or
| 	any of the annoyances that could cause the boot process to hang,
| 	just bring up a network, fire up an sshd, and start sending mail
| 	to anybody who might be able to fix it.
That's something I never thought about but actually makes more sense
than I thought at first read.

| 4)	Also on my presonal 'things to break list':  An encrypted root
| 	partition, a boot partition as described above, but it always
| 	brings up sshd -- which allows the admin of the system to ssh
| 	in and enter the passphrase for the root partition.
Now here's finally a way how I can encrypt my rootfs :D

| 	Anyway, once the passphrase is entered and the fix is in, just
| 	tell the system to continue (in an unspecified and murky mystical
| 	way ... I guess one could start sshd in debug mode, so it exits
| 	after each connection) and it completes the boot process.
Just using a special "shell" that exits after successful mounting of the
rootfs should be fine here.

Care to share what you've got so far?
If I got that right it might be possible to use Tobias' rescue target
for this purpose quite fine. Also I've been looking for a way to more
easily get encryption going than to mount a monitor and keyboard to my
server :/

Tobias, any thoughts on whether that's possible without tweaking it too
much?

Anyone else got thoughts here? I'd like to revamp the boot process to
allow for this kind of stuff easily.


Greetings,
	blindy

- --
Benjamin 'blindCoder' Schieder
Registered Linux User #289529: http://counter.li.org
finger blindcoder-1k+CIuW/[email protected] | gpg --import
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