This is a fictionalised account of something that really happened, several times, so I know perfectly well how silly it is. This also extracts the urine from several people I consider friends. I hope they don’t take it personally 😉

The scenario:

A client or friend calls you up panicked, crying; “It won’t start! It keeps saying ‘Invalid system disk'”, or “I can’t save anything! It says read only filesystem!’

Of course you want to leap to their aid, but you’re 100 miles away and still haven’t had your coffee, so you say,

“Don’t worry, I can fix this remotely! Do you have another computer connected to the internet and a USB stick or a DVD writer (and blank a DVD)?”

“Of course, I always have these things around in case of emergency…”

“Great! Now I need you to download Ubuntu!”

“Ubuntu?”

“Yes, Ubuntu, it has all the tools I need to fix it remotely!”

“Um, Ok, but it’s like 700 megs, that’s going to take me a while…”

“Trust me it’s worth it…”

You now have time to get a coffee, and breakfast, and take your fish out cycling, etc. Then they call you back;

“Ok, I’ve got the Ubuntu disk, and I figured you wanted me to boot up the broken system with it so it’s ready for you to log in!”

“Not quite, I need you to log in and install openssh-server using apt-get.”

“Ok, Good thing I’m a whiz at this eh? Can I have your job?”

“No you can’t. Now you need to start the ssh daemon.”

“Done!”

“Now find out what IP address your machine has.”

“One, Nine, Two, dot, One, Six…”

This is the part where you tap your fingers impatiently thinking, “I just need the last part, I know what subnet you’re using!” Then you say;

“Great, note down that number and then add a port forwarding rule on your firewall to send traffic for port 8022 to port 22 on the IP that you just wrote down.”

“Ok, TCP or UDP.”

“TCP”

“Ok, done. Can you log in now?”

“Not quite, I just remembered you will need to set a password for the ubuntu user…”

“Ok the password is G0ldF1sh. Can you log in now?”

“Yes I can! Please plug in your backup drive and I’ll have you up and running in a jiffy! Failing that, I’ll rescue what data I can.”

What follows is a scramble to install everything you need, hardware diagnostics, NTFS tools, ddrescue and the like, before you even begin to copy the first byte from the damaged disk.

“There must be a better way” you think to yourself.

Enter: Mother’s Arms Rescue System! The boot-disk for remote rescuing!

Can boot from CD, DVD or USB.

Only 170MB (talk about bloat!)

Networking and sshd are on by default.

The ‘ma’ user has the password ‘rescueme’ remote root login is not enabled.

Everything can be done through sudo.

Includes a useful set of diagnostic and rescue utilities installed by default.

Based on ArchLinux so it has pacman available.

Built using the Archiso tools, same as the ArchLinux install disk and closely following their development.

Long-term-support Kernel.

Download via BitTorrent here: http://www.mothers-arms.co.uk/MARS-2012-03-02-i686.iso.torrent

Clone my Git repo here: http://gitorious.org/mothers-arms

Future plans:

Documentation! Aaaagh!

Openvpn for auto-configuration of the network. This is so you can give the client a hostname and password, which is then used to log the broken computer on to your own ad-hoc VPN.

More utilities for SCSI and RAID controller hardware diagnostics. e.g. cciss-vol-status

Incorporate suggestions from the community 🙂 (mailing list here: mars@librelist.com)

In my next post:

How to create a multi-boot USB stick!