Recovery
Recovery
It's easy to use our control panel to recover from situations such as a forgotten root password, as well as more drastic situations.
Boot from CD
In order to recover your virtual server, you can boot it into a live environment from a virtual cdrom, which can then be used to repair your server. For example, you may want to boot to a Debian cdrom, which includes a recovery mode.
You can do this by switching to a virtual ISO image.
Connect to the virtual display
You will need to access your server's virtual display over VNC to communicate with your virtual machine.
Boot to recovery mode using a Debian CD
We will assume you are using the Debian CD. Most Linux distros offer a similar recovery mode, but the details will be different.
- Select
Advanced options→Rescue mode. - Select a language, location, and keyboard from the next 3 menu screens.
- Wait for the CD to find various components and configure the network.
- If you are invited to configure a hostname and domain name, you can accept the defaults.
- Now you will be asked to choose a root filesystem. Unless you chose an
unusual partitioning scheme when you installed the OS, the highlighted option
/dev/vda1will usually be correct. - Finally, choose the highlighted option
Execute a shell in /dev/sda1
Perform your recovery steps
At this point, you will be at a root shell prompt, and you can perform any recovery steps you need. For the case of resetting the root password, all you need to type is the passwd command.
Boot to advanced recovery mode using an Ubuntu CD
For more advanced recovery methods, if you need to access a full live Linux environment, we recommend selecting an Ubuntu live-server cdrom. This includes a full live Ubuntu environment, rather than the minimal environment on a Debian netinst CD. You can access a shell in this environment by navigating to Help then Enter shell. If you prefer to access this environment over SSH, after setting an IP address, you can navigate to Help then Help on SSH access which will start an SSH server with a randomly generated password.
Rebooting
When you are finished, exit the recovery shell with the command exit. This will return you to the last menu; this time you can choose the Reboot the system option.
This will reboot from the CD, so you need to go back to our control panel, power your server off, set it to boot from disk, and start it again.
More help?
If you need further help, please email support for advice. If you have a complicated recovery situation, or one which you think is beyond your expertise, we may be able to help on a chargeable consultancy basis—please ask.