Fascinated*

Sju sjösjuka sjömän sköttes av sju sköna sjuksköterskor

WICKED Swedish tongue twister

“Seven seasick seamen were helped by seven beautiful nurses”

(via @pht)

Get a FreeBSD Machine in Single User mode onto the network with ssh

So you’ve got a broken FreeBSD machine, with some boot disk errors that’s refusing to boot into multiuser mode.  Because of disk block errors, you also can’t usefully run “fsck -y -f” in single user mode since it fails to check or save corrected data onto the disk. Add to this the fact that all you have are some remote hands that you can’t ask to do too many things.

You need to get the machine up and running, networked and ssh working, so that you can salvage the data and prepare a recovery plan.  Here’s how:

1. Boot machine, pick 4 for single user mode on the Welcome to FreeBSD screen
2. Hit enter for the shell
3. mount -a -o ro # this will remount all partitions in readonly mode, should work even if lots of blocks are damaged
4. ifconfig fxp0 up # or whatever your nic device is, fxp0 is the famous Intel EEPRO one
5. ifconfig fxp0 inet 192.168.1.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 # substitute your favorite ip and netmask, but keep in mind that once you start ssh, it will not prompt the user for a password, so probably not something for a public network
6. /etc/rc.d/sshd forcestart # this makes ssh start, naturally.  It may complain about not being able to write somewhere, but if you have /var and other things mounted at least read-only, it will work
7. ssh someuser@192.168.1.10 # this will log you in as any user without a password, careful with that :)
8. Save the world, collect $200/hr for the IT miracle.

For whatever reason, I haven’t seen this documented in my Googling, so here you have it, good luck!