Rafal Olechowski, 123RF.com

Touring the top Knoppix debugging and rescue tools

To the Rescue

Article from ADMIN 00/2010

By Klaus Knopper

Knoppix boots from the DVD drive and comes with a collection of powerful troubleshooting tools. Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper counts down his favorite rescue utilities.

Most "automatic disk repair tools" break more than they recover by shredding already partly defective media to pieces in an attempt to automatically "repair" inconsistencies. Because these programs usually don't know anything about the facts that caused the original problem, they often make false assumptions on how to proceed.

Seasoned sys admins typically prefer to arrive for system rescue scenarios with a collection of simpler, more task-oriented tools.

The Knoppix DVD included with this issue comes with several useful rescue utilities that admins use every day to diagnose and repair broken systems. Because Knoppix is a Live system, it is designed to run from the DVD drive, which means you can use it to troubleshoot computers that won't boot normally because of mis-configuration or disk errors. Built-in NTFS support and other onboard Windows-ready utilities mean that Knoppix is well suited for troubleshooting Windows as well as Linux systems.

We asked Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper to tell us about his top 10 Knoppix rescue tools or tool combinations.

1. lspci, dmesg, and the /proc and /sys Filesystems

The virtual procfs filesystem, which is usually mounted as /proc , not only contains directories for each running process (hence its name), but also system information and interfaces for kernel subsystems such as network and filesystems. You can obtain critical information with the simplest text display program cat , and options can be set with echo .

Table 1 shows some examples of /proc commands. The output of cat /proc/interrupts is shown in Listing 1.

Table 1

/proc Filesystem Commands

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