Re: 9.1-RC3 LiveCD missing features

On Fri, 2012-12-07 at 23:34 +0100, Bas Smeelen wrote:
> On 12/07/12 23:11, Chuck Burns wrote:
> > On 12/7/2012 3:50 PM, CeDeROM wrote:
> >> Hello :-)
> >>
> >> I have tried to chceck for badblocks on my / but I did not find 
> >> badblocks
> >> program on LiveCD and there is no option to install it. This is very 
> >> useful
> >> utility, please add it as part of LiveCD :-)
> >>
> >> Also there is a problem with DHCP based workstations using LiveCD -
> >> although interface gets configured it is impossible to update
> >> /etc/resolv.conf (by dhclient and by hand) and so this workstation 
> >> pretty
> >> useless for IPv4 (is it more usable on IPv6?). Please update :-)
> >>
> >> Thank you :-)
> >> Tomek
> >>
> >>
> >
> > dd if=/dev/zer of=/dev/ada0
> >
> > ^^^ There's your "badblocks" program.  Any hard drive made in the last 
> > decade have been self-remapping..  Attempting to write to a bad block 
> > will cause the hard drive to remap an unused sector into it's place, 
> > until the drive runs out of said "unused" backup sectors, and at that 
> > time, will begin simply begin just "losing" storage space... IE the 
> > number of total sectors on the drive will begin to shrink.
> >
> :)
> 
> /dev/zero
> 
> Badblocks is outdated for more than 17 years I guess
> The dd mentioned above will let the firmware remap all bad sectors until 
> there are no spare sectors left (and wipe anything on disk as a bonus :) 
> ;then you can begin to think about replacing your harddrive.
> 
> As for DHCP, it works for me when booting from a netinstall for instance 
> or going to fixit.
> Tomek, please try to describe more accurately what you are doing and try 
> to accomplish
> 
> Cheers

When booting a system with a read-only root filesystem (a LiveCD is one
example of such), DHCP works in the sense that you get an IP address,
but because it can't write the nameserver address into /etc/resolv.conf
you're left with a system that's on a network but you can't do much with
it unless you have a really good memory for IP addresses.

It has to be fixed when the readonly filesystem is created.  If you
make /etc/resolv.conf a symlink to ../var/db/resolv.conf it works out
pretty well.  If you're not using dhcp, then instead of having a
missing /etc/resolv.conf you have a symlink to missing file.  When you
are using DHCP, it is able to write the resolv.conf file in /var and
life is good.

-- Ian