From owner-freebsd-hackers  Fri Jul 14 19:34:37 2000
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Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 22:34:28 -0400 (EDT)
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From: Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@home.com>
To: John Reynolds <jjreynold@home.com>
Subject: RE: chapter about using the fixit floppy?
Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, doc@FreeBSD.ORG
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On 04:40:42 John Reynolds wrote:
> 
> Is there a chapter of the Handbook that details how to use the "fixit"
> floppy?
> 

I just recently had an "interesting" fixit experience as well.
Device entries are just part of it.  I think a general outline of
the "fixit" environment is needed, together with a description of
how to handle some common tasks in the environment.

The Fixit environment is sufficiently bizarre that even a seasoned
UNIX pro will likely have trouble figuring things out.  This is
complicated a little by there being three distinct Fixit environments
that vary wildly:

 o  Holographic Fixit shell,
 o  Fixit Diskette, and
 o  CD Fixit.

I'd like to see a "Fixit" section somewhere under "Advanced
Topics".  It might have a couple of sentences about single user mode,
but mostly discuss Fixit environments.

It would deal with the three main environments.  For each, outlining

 o  what gets mounted where,
 o  where your shell is chroot'ed to (if anywhere),
 o  what things are in the path and what they're capable of, and
 o  how to carry out some basic tasks

The example tasks might be:

 o  doing a disklabel/newfs
 o  installing boot blocks
 o  restoring a dump
 o  fixing an fstab

John's experiences would fit somewhere into this I'm sure.

I'd like to give something like this a go, unless there is already
material in place that I don't know about.  Any suggestions about
topics that I've missed?  Pointers to source materials?

See you,

============================================================
Gardner Buchanan                         <gbuchana@home.com>
Ottawa, ON             FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.


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