Aaargh
It's not that my home gateway machine fell over dead last night. No, I take a nightly backup (it's a freebsd box, so it's in the traditional bsd dump format) and save that off on three different disks on two different machines. It's not that the freebsd install disk I found was for a different version of freebsd (the gateway runs freebsd 4.8, but the only freebsd install disks I found were for various point releases of versions 1, 2, and 3. FreeBSD is an operating system that makes Linux's promiscuous interface churn seem like a paragon of stability, so the whole idea of "restoring" a 4.8 machine from a 3.5.1 boot cd falls into the realm of a grand and horrible farce.)
No, it's that the stupid boot cd doesn't include such trivial repair facilities as ed or mount, so if you don't have the second boot CD, all you can do is fire up an "emergency holographic shell" that allows you to, um, er, run cat and echo on the contents of the install cd's emulated floppy images.
Now that's *really* useful. Even more so when you've just pulled the former root disk from a machine (you can tell it's a former root disk because when it's powered up it goes "whirrrrr *clunk!* whirrrrr *clunk!* (repeat until you power off the machine)" when you attempt to access information that's not on the first cylinder.) It's even more useful when you realize that your goose is cooked at about 11:25pm on a Sunday night, and there's nothing left to do but power down the entire network until I can hunt down the full two-disk set of CDs at the freebsd archive and download them to a machine that's got
- a network connection
- a cd burner
- aaaaand an operating system that comes with a version of cdrecord
It does not help, of course, that the ftp connection is running at a whopping 40k/sec (300kbit, or a bit less than a third of a T-1) and will finish retrieving the 4.8 iso images at approximately 5pm.
Perhaps it's time to buy a 1 gb compact flash and stuff the root filesystem of my gateway onto it. I'm sure it will have its own spectacular failure cases, but a 1gb filesystem can be smashed down to fit onto a 700mb cd image, and if I'm very lucky I could also stuff a tiny restore kernel onto that cd as well.