9. Emergency Repair Environment

Warning

The instructions in this section are intended for experienced administrators with profound knowledge of Kernun UTM and FreeBSD.

The Kernun UTM installer booted from the installation medium can be used to repair the system if all system partitions are unable to boot. The available functions are accessible from the installer main menu:

1. Install Kernun
2. Check for existing Kernun installations
3. Restore backup
4. Start rescue shell
5. Mount Kernun file systems
6. Resize installer's in-memory temporary file system (current size 32m)
7. Halt
8. Power down
9. Reboot
0. Install license

Option 1 is described in Section 5.1, “Standalone Installer”. Options 7, 8, and 9 are self-descriptive. Option 2 displays the boot manager configuration and the disk device names.

System disk is /dev/ad0
Boot manager on ZFS pool 'kernun'
F1: Kernun 3.11 2018/06/06 07:36 (031100h00.201806111345.amd64)
F2: Unused
F3: Unused
type=Kernun ZFS boot manager ver. 1.0
current_booted=NONE
bootable=1
update=1
default_selection=F1

Option 3 restores a backup selected from a list of backup files found in /data/backup. If the backup is stored on another medium, it must be first copied to the /data/backup directory, using for example the rescue shell (option 4). For details about backup and restoring, see Section 6, “Backup and Restoring”.

Option 4 starts a rescue shell (bash). It provides the environment for emergency maintenance of a computer with non-bootable Kernun UTM installations. The rescue shell (as well as the whole standalone installer) runs in a custom FreeBSD environment. The standard Kernun UTM kernel is used. The root file system is mounted from the installation medium and is therefore read-only. A read-write RAM disk for temporary data is mounted under /tmp, symlinked also from /var/tmp. The standard size of the RAM disk is 32 MB. It can be resized using option 6 of the installer main menu.

Warning

The content of the RAM disk is lost when the installer is terminated or when the RAM disk is resized.

Caution

Do not make the RAM disk too large, because its content is stored in the kernel memory. If the free kernel memory gets too low, the kernel may panic.

Option 5 of the menu mounts any existing Kernun UTM partitions under the directories /1, /2, /3 (the system partitions), and /data (the data partition). The rescue shell provides many standard FreeBSD command line programs. Programs from a mounted Kernun UTM system partition can be run as well.

Tip

It is often useful to perform a chroot(8) to a mounted Kernun UTM system partition and to run commands in the chrooted environment.