Geek Saga of the Headless Penguin

Exactly one week ago, we had a brief power outage. The kind of thing that reminds you how many little gizmos in your life rely on a constant power feed (as they blink 12:00 at you upon your return home.) Not everything blinked 12:00. One PC acted odd until the CD was ejected that it was attempting to boot from. One file server, a little headless Linux box, never recovered at all.

Headless is geekese for a computer that has no human type I/O devices attached. Particularly, no monitor (thus the headless). but also, no keyboard or mouse. Such machines live on networks and are controlled by other computers through a wide range of programs. Most commonly programs that allow the network attached user to pretend they are really are sitting at the machine and it really has a "head."

And what do you do when a headless server goes belly up? Well, you generally have to move a ton of wires, or the box itself, to give it head. After doing the wire dance I booted up my buggered box and got to "LI." LILO was what I wanted; this puppy's hosed. So, after digging up a shinny new LiveCD ( Knoppix, from a magazine promo ), I boot from that.

Debian, the heralded stable golden child of Linux devotes, ate a boot file during its unplanned shutdown. Particularly annoying, said file lives in mount point which is theoretically safe and unmounted after the boot process completes. Good news is that the data looks fine and I should be able fix the OS, bad news is I have to leave the head on and I really don't want to. Thus begins the quest for a LiveCD to fix an headless server with.

This is what I need to fix my headless box. I need a basic Linux OS with an SSH server and FTP server. It will need to boot into to a usable state with no keyboard interaction. It'll have to use DHCP. I don't need any X crap, the leaner and meaner the better. Samba would be cool. There are a ton of livecds in the world, I shouldn't have a problem finding one to do this...

Wrong. After a long and annoying hunt I determined that a livecd with my particular requirements is a gaping black hole in the distro universe. Even the rescue CDs don't think to fire up servers, the router CDs are eccentric, the rest want to wow me with an X desktop big enough to make even the newest PCs creek a little under the weight. "If you want it done right..."

Time to roll my own livecd. I could just make a minimal Linux install and burn it on a CD, but what would be the fun in that? There are lots of livecd projects out there, more than I expected. There's one from Debian; I couldn't get it to work. A few that allow you to add stuff to Knoppix and clones; too bloated. Morphix showed promise, but wanted X. Eventually, I looked at Slax.

Slax is a very cleaver design, using modules and built in compression. For me (being spoilt by APT), Slackware is a little too hands on when it comes to package management, but it's well suited to this project. It's got a really fast boot and little cruft. Like all these kind of projects, the learning curve can be a little steep, but I ultimately made the CD I wanted; a week later!

Now I have more to do. I've dubbed my livecd THRALL ( The Headless Remote Administration Linux LiveCD ). Yes, the name was a significant part of the development process. It will feature SSH, an ftp server that encrypts the password handshake, PHP and a number of custom web based tools. The big one is being able to change the password via an https page. The webserver will be, get this, Nanoweb, an HTTP server written entirely in PHP.

Have I rescued my files from the dead server yet? Nope. Am I having fun perfecting my livecd project? Yep.