Bad moon rising
Feb. 17th, 2006 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylToday looks like being a bad day. First I spent five painful minutes trying to put my left contact lens in only to belatedly discover that I had it inside out, then when I got in to work I found that the workstation network was out of action after an automatic job had accidentally nuked the system configuration files, including the password file.
It's like one of those geekish unix games that involve escaping from a deliberately convoluted disaster situation, like having a completely empty password file, without reinstalling from scratch: how do you role out a set of fixes to a cluster of workstations if none of the machines have a root account? Is there a neat, hackerish solution or do you just have to go around with a whole bunch of boot CDs?
Updated: It turned out that the best way to fix the problem was to arm 7–8 people with CDs with copies of the correct password file, then send them out to boot each affected machine into single user and fix things that way. Unpleasant and time consuming when you've got a couple of hundred boxes to do, but ultimately effective.
It's like one of those geekish unix games that involve escaping from a deliberately convoluted disaster situation, like having a completely empty password file, without reinstalling from scratch: how do you role out a set of fixes to a cluster of workstations if none of the machines have a root account? Is there a neat, hackerish solution or do you just have to go around with a whole bunch of boot CDs?
Updated: It turned out that the best way to fix the problem was to arm 7–8 people with CDs with copies of the correct password file, then send them out to boot each affected machine into single user and fix things that way. Unpleasant and time consuming when you've got a couple of hundred boxes to do, but ultimately effective.
