Debian installer rescue mode
- It has been suggested that this page should be merged with Debian
This page is currently a draft.
Material may not yet be complete, information may presently be omitted, and certain parts of the content may be subject to radical, rapid alteration. More information pertaining to this may be available on the talk page.
Material may not yet be complete, information may presently be omitted, and certain parts of the content may be subject to radical, rapid alteration. More information pertaining to this may be available on the talk page.
Some notes on having access to Debian installer in rescue mode in physical servers of WMF infrastructure.
Accessing the rescue mode can help in restoring a bad grub configuration, getting into a given offile file-system, running fsck or other disk maintenance tasks.
Option 1: interrupting autoinstall
This option consist on interrupting the standard debian installer autoinstall mechanism (with preseed) and then escaping the install process by means of the debian installer menu, and then operating the underlying operating system.
Option 2: pxe-bootable rescue image
This option is under development. See phab:T78135.
After https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/operations/puppet/+/654192 it is now possible to use the rescue image during PXE boot. A typical workflow could be:
- Use the
sre.hosts.dhcpcookbook to ephemerally configure the host for DHCP - Powercycle the host
- Force PXE (via F12 for example on Dells)
- When the "boot: " prompt pops up, type "rescue" and hit enter
- When finished, exit the cookbook to restore DHCP configuration