Re: I finally bricked my NetBSD system

[Hisashi T Fujinaka <htodd%twofifty.com@localhost>]

On Fri, 17 Jul 2020, Martin Husemann wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 09:54:06PM -0700, Andy Ruhl wrote:
> > What about booting from install media and dropping /rescue/sh into
> > whatever the defined shell path is? Isn't that a statically linked
> > binary that should work pretty much anywhere? Isn't that kinda what
> > it's for?
>
> Yes, that works too.
>
> It mostly is intended for when you have really bricked your base install,
> like broken libc.so or ld.elf_so - then you can still "boot -a" and ask
> for /rescue/sh as shell.
>
> I like the "cp some other shell to /usr/pkg/bin/tcsh" way as that allows
> me to fully go multiuser and do all additional recover steps over the
> network.

I do this from time-to-time. More often than I'd like to admit, because
one of my machines runs -current all the time.

Download the USB-compatible image. Burn it to a stick. Boot from the
stick into single-user mode (or drop into single-user mode from an
install image). Edit /etc/passwd using "ed".

I have to do something similar on my work machines when my Linux
updates break from time-to-time.

--
Hisashi T Fujinaka - htodd%twofifty.com@localhost
BSEE + BSChem + BAEnglish + MSCS + $2.50 = coffee