[ale] Forcing RW on boot

[Brian Pitts]

On 03/30/2010 12:57 PM, Chris Fowler wrote:
> I've dealing with a server that has been hacked and mount is corrupted.
> I can not remount root as rw so what I'm trying to do is pass command
> line arguments to the kernel via grub to do it.  I've specified 'rw' but
> it is still ro and I'm passing init=/bin/sh.  My goal is to upload
> pieces off a CentOS 5.4 install image to boot into a serial mode so that
> I can reload the box over the Internet.  

Is there a separate /boot partition that you can write to? If so, drop
something like Tiny Core Linux [0] on it, set grub to boot that and
start ssh, and repair things from there.

Another idea if you can write to /boot would be to use rom-o-matic [1]
to generate a gpxe [2] image bootable by grub (lkrn format). You could
then use gpxe to boot another distribution over http. Instead of setting
up your own, you could just the lkrn and server from boot.kernel.org

[0] http://www.tinycorelinux.com/
[1] http://rom-o-matic.net/gpxe/gpxe-1.0.0/contrib/rom-o-matic/
[2] http://etherboot.org/wiki/index.php

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts