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ethan (3163)

ethan
  reversethis-{ed. ... rap.nov.olissat}
Being a 25-year old chap living in the western-most town of Germany. Stuying communication and information science and being a huge fan of XS-related things.

Journal of ethan (3163)

Monday January 27, 2003
11:02 AM

Perl saving my ass

[ #10215 ]

I had some remarkable progress with FreeBSD today, which included compiling my first kernel (after which I was eventually able to mount my linux partition) and making my DSL run. The latter was a particular pleasure since it only took two minutes and thus beats the same procedure on Linux (where I still don't quite know why my DSL works).

Automating the dialing-up however through rc.conf led into a fiasco. I was left in a sort of primitive single user mode with none of the two available text editors (ee and vim) working any longer. So you tell me how to reverse changes to a text file without an editor.

But of course, Perl was still working and I was able to repair rc.conf with a one-liner (typing it took me a while since I only had the American layout on my German keyboard...hard to find characters such as ', ! and /).

Btw, this journal entry here is my first contribution to the www backed by FreeBSD.


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  • You can usually get ee or vim working by doing
    mount -u /
    mount /usr
    mount /var

    Alternatively, you could have used ed(1). It's not pretty, but not impossible either. It's saved my bacon a number of times...

    -Dom

    • I don't think this was actually single user mode (I wasn't able to find out really). It looked as though booting was incomplete: it tried to dial with the message PPP started as root and that was it then. No login, it simply dropped to a shell.

      I am not yet fully grokking FreeBSD, I am afraid. After my succesful compilation of the kernel I had to learn that it no longer asked for the password when logging in as root so I had to re-set the password using /stand/sysinstall. Very weird.

      But still, it appears t
  • Every admin should take the 15 minutes that it takes to read ed(1), and play with it for another 15 minutes, for those fateful days when nothing is working right and you need to edit a file.
    --
    • Randal L. Schwartz
    • Stonehenge
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