Interesting deployments

[curaga]

Stumbled upon this: http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1jaiea/half_of_the_posts_here_are_depressing_as_hell

Had to remotely migrate 500 Debian based small pc's to Ubuntu preserving all data and settings plus repartition disk.

I made a custom mini-linux with tiny core linux which is just a kernel + imagefile with everything plus my script. Put it on bootloader (grub) and reboot from it. Then it would first backup settings + data and then increase the size of root volume. After that it downloaded Ubuntu installation in tar.bz file and unpack it in place. After that restore settings + data, reconfigure bootloader and reboot to Ubuntu.

It felt rather good to just sit there and watch them come back online one by one.

Have to add that they were truly remote, all over europe.

EDIT: I'll update this post later today how I basically did it, re-authoring tiny core linux + relevant parts of the script itself.

EDIT2: And here you go, how I did it.

Remastering Tiny Core Linux is easy http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:remastering I did it mainly the "Alternative approach to adding extensions. (Overlay using cat)" way. You just basically cat needed software packages into one file. Base.gz and all needed tools after that, with this I needed: e2fsprogs.gz openssl-1.0.0.gz tar.gz util-linux.gz and wget.gz. You can download those from tiny core repos.

Tiny Core Linux runs /opt/bootlocal.sh automatically, so I made my own cpio.gz archive which contained that file and some others that I needed, like new menu.lst for grub.

Preparing those Debian boxes was done with a script, which just copied tiny core linux files under /boot and altered menu.lst from grub to boot tiny core linux on next reboot. Script also copied all settings to backup location from where they were then restored.

Here's the main script in pastebin, there's not much comments but I tried to echo almost everything onscreen so that will help understanding the script.

[curaga]

We've received word that Metro Systems has a TC deployment with ~7000 daily users. It's used as a VMWare View PCoIP client.

[curaga]

In addition to OCZ, PC Engines now uses TC for their BIOS-flashing:
http://www.pcengines.ch/tinycore.htm

[curaga]

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/practical-tiny-core-fire-service

A fire station in Pennsylvania is using TC for a status display.

[mocore]

Something interesting! called `hyperos` that  'runs hypercore, a tiny ramdisk linux VM (~13mb custom tinycore linux)'
..

HyperOS is a set of components that make it easy to quickly download and run containerized software on top of version controlled data in a reproducible way without sacrificing performance.

[curaga]

https://howucan.gr/scripts-tools/2369-evilabigail-automated-linux-evil-maid-attack

TC used as a small Evil Maid bootable stick.