Born this Day (Lord Willing) The Crash Cart Project

David Desscan ddesscan at gmail.com
Wed Aug 23 13:30:29 UTC 2006


A very good idea.  I think the first thing to is to search for existing
tools. This is surely the first thing you thought of ;-). We don't have to
reinvent the wheel but to improve or add new features or even writing new
applications from scratch.  I like the idea of something like a Swiss Army
Knife.  We have very handy Swiss Army knives here and some of them come with
a lot of  tools which can be useful in whatever situation. Anyway whatever
the name you give it should serve its purpose.  Well for bad HW, I am
thinking of a Linux embedded diagnostic board.  What about if the first
sector of a HDD is damaged.  Is it possible to make the read/write heads
start reading from another position on the disk?  This might be possible
with Assembly language programming.  There are a lot of nifty tool like that
which can be part of this recovery set.  I think we have a lot of data
recovery tools out there.

http://crashrecovery.org/
http://www.microlite.com/News_and_Events/pressfallcomdex99/pressfallcomdex99.htm
http://www.sophisticated.com/products/kick-off/kick-off_lin.html (hardware)
http://freshmeat.net/projects/crk/ (refer to crash recovery)
http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/Disk_Maintenance_and_Repair_Utilities/SOS_Crash_Recovery.html
(first thing I'll do is backup my user and configuration data)
http://www.softplatz.com/freeware/data-recovery/
What about putting autonomic computing features in Linux e.g. would be Nitix
http://www.nitix.com/technologies/autonomic.php

Ok the list could grow longer and longer but I like the idea and am willing
to help.

Good Luck Tod

David

On 8/23/06, Tod Merley <todbot88 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi All!
>
> I would like to start a project (OK, perhaps there is already one
> ongoing, if so, I would like to know about it) dedicated to recovery
> from a system crash (broken X, bad HW, anything making the machine
> non-functional).  I am thinking of first a set of applications which
> gather information about the running system (or what one should look
> like when it is running)(HW list, SW list, Boot sector copy, config
> files, critical files md5s, results of lspci, lsmod, "normal" log
> files (/var/log) etc....  Then a set of applications designed to go in
> (not booting from the crippled system) and gather the same sorts of
> information for comparison and understanding the problem now crippling
> the computer in the shop.  And then a set of applications which fix,
> flag, or tell the owner the bad news determined about the problem
> computer.
>
> Perhaps the process could make for the developers a standard "Crash
> Cart Packet" consisting of parts of the logs and command results
> (maybe an X-packet, Kernel-packet, Audio-packet, etc).
>
> Well, that is it.  Just an idea.
>
> I really do not know how to start or be part of such a thing.  I guess
> I will follow those before me and send an e-mail.
>
> If interested in the motivation - read on:
>
> Last night I wrote an e-mail to a gentleman who lost some computers.
> He thought it might be FC5 (He was doing a fresh install or upgrade).
>
> I have seen several on the lists needing crash help.
>
> I also responded to another gentleman who was experiencing an
> "updated" Xorg which broke (no GUI!!).  I encouraged him to copy some
> of the basic log files and help us all heal from our very human
> tendency to break things.
>
> Today I woke up, pressed the on button on my computer, got a cup of
> coffee, and came back to an ncurses error screen partially obscured by
> an exit to a prompt.  My silly old video card already has some
> irritations with X/Dapper (hash on the screen after monitor has put
> itself to sleep) so my prompt was without cursor and the screen was
> changing colors as I went (I think part of the ncurses applet was
> still running somehow along with the shell).
>
> I thought I had swallowed a bug!
>
> However when Puppy and then Dapper Live booted - xorg.conf the same
> but the Xorg binary of very recent date - I remembered the problems I
> commented on and replaced my Xorg from the live CD and was happy.
>
> Please let me know if there is interest!
>
> Thanks!
>
> Tod
>
> --
> fedora-list mailing list
> fedora-list at redhat.com
> To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20060823/6889a4e8/attachment-0001.htm>


More information about the fedora-list mailing list