

Re: Is there room for improvement in rescue mode? (was Re: Goodbye, Fedora)

Jeff Spaleta wrote:

For the purposes of this discussion, we will take it for granted that
at some point in the course of a 3 or 4 releases, many (i dare not say
most..but many) people who are acting as the primary sysadmin for a
fedora install will experience some sort of human error which will
render their system unbootable.  This is an unasailable axiom for the
rest of this discussion.

What can we do in the timescale of an F8 release to make using the
rescue mode easier and more obvious course of action.  Are there ways
we can advertise its existence as part of sysadmin interaction with a
normal operating system? Would it be helpful to slip in a rescue
environment as a grub menu option instead of relying on install media?

That would be cool, another related improvement would be to stick the rescue image itself in /boot or in some rescue partition that can be defined in Anaconda. IIRC it was 80MB or something to download the rescue-only ISO, that's lost in the noise nowadays for most cases.

Does it make sense to spend some effort making a more featurefull
rescue-like environment with guided troubleshooting characteristics?
What are the top three implementable ideas which would encourage
casual admins to reach for the rescue environment instead of a full
wipe and re-install?

I know what would help people "reach for it": if something noticeably fatal happens during the boot, reboot into the rescue image automatically right away with a path to the broken dmesg and/or initscript output sitting there along with some help text. Maybe even use a HW watchdog action to get into the rescue even after something really fatal.

Extra bonus power if it can catch the full dmesg / panic somewhere the survives the warm boot.

Super invulnerability power points if sshd comes up too if it can find the original /etc/sysconfig stuff so even remote servers can be adminned after a panic.

