Recovery mode
Recovery mode is available to all Software and Hardware RAID dedicated server customers, and is accessed through our Control Panel.
Recovery mode allows you to reboot your server into an network mounted Linux installation. Once booted, you can mount your server's own file system and carry out repairs or configuration necessary to get your server booting again.
If you have a managed server and are experiencing issues requiring recovery mode, please contact support, and our technical staff will be happy to help boot the server into recovery mode and repair the issues.
Setting up access to recovery mode
In order to use recovery mode, you will need an SSH key pair, used for authentication. If you do not have one, see our documentation on using SSH keys.
You can add your SSH public key to recovery mode in our Control Panel. Keys added here will allow you to log into any servers that use recovery mode on your account.
Booting into recovery mode
In order to boot your server into recovery mode, you will need to reboot it and set it to PXE boot from the network, typically using an option in the BIOS. The exact method for this will depend on the server, but typically you can enter the BIOS using a specific key during boot, eg Delete or Escape, and then set the server to network boot using an option within the Boot menu in the BIOS.
Using recovery mode
When your server is up in recovery mode, you will be able to log in as root using the ssh key you have provided. It is very likely that you will get a warning from ssh about the host key of your server having changed. This is expected, and can be safely ignored.
Our recovery mode includes a wide range of standard Linux utilities, which can be used to manage and repair your server as needed.
Chroot
It can be useful to chroot (change root) into the dedicated server if we need to repair various things. This switches you into an environment very much like your normal server, with your normal root filesystem. To use this, you would do something like:
recovery:~# mkdir /mnt/root
recovery:~# mount /dev/sda6 /mnt/root # The root device will depend on your partition layout
recovery:~# mount --bind /sys /mnt/root/sys
recovery:~# mount --bind /proc /mnt/root/proc
recovery:~# mount --bind /dev /mnt/root/dev
recovery:~# mount --bind /run /mnt/root/run
recovery:~# chroot /mnt/root
recovery:/# mount /boot
When you're done, you should leave the chroot environment and unmount your filesystem before rebooting:
recovery:~# exit # leave chroot
recovery:~# umount /mnt/root/{proc,dev,sys,boot,run} # unmount filesystems in chroot
recovery:~# umount /mnt/root # unmount root filesystem
Reinstalling
Debian and Ubuntu can both be readily installed from recovery mode. If you order a new server, we will typically do this for you.
We have some custom scripts that can be used to partition the disks in your server and install an operating system.
For our partitioning tool, please run:
mythic-partition-disks --help
For installing the operating system, please see:
mythic-install-linux --help
You can also install your own operating system manually using standard tooling, such as debootstrap - our scripts simply wrap these.
Credits
Our recovery mode makes use of some excellent open source projects, most notably iPXE and the Debian Live build tools.