14 DAY TRIAL // SystemRescueCd 1.4.0, the latest iteration of the popular recovery live CD based on the Gentoo Linux distribution, has been released. SystemRescueCd 1.4.0 comes with several updated packages and new versions for both the standard and the alternative kernel, but there are also a couple of new boot options, which should come in especially handy for those booting over a network.
"SystemRescueCd 1.4.0 introduces two new options that allow you to boot from NFS v3 or NBD. Basically, if the computer on which you work had no CDRom drive, or if you just want to boot SystemRescueCd from the network for any other reason, you can install network services somewhere else on your network (dhcp server, tftp server, http/nfs/nbd server) and you will be able to boot SystemRescueCd from the network," François Dupoux wrote in the official announcement.
The problem with this is that, after the first stages of the network boot process, the entire root filesystem image had to be dowloaded into memory to continue. Because most of the time this meant grabbing the image from a remote Internet location, the process was rather slow. The second big drawback is that this method needs at least 400 MB of memory to store the image and still have some left to run the actual programs.
With the new boot methods in SystemRescueCd 1.4.0, these two problems are alleviated. Using either NFS (network file system) or NBD (network block device), the root filesystem isn't downloaded to memory and mounted from there, instead it is mounted remotely over the network.
Highlights of SystemRescueCd 1.4.0:
· Updated the standard Linux kernel packages to 2.6.32.9; · Updated the alternative Linux kernel packages to 2.6.27.45; · Updated Mozilla Firefox to 3.6; · Added the zfs-fuse-0.6.0 filesystem; · Updated fsarchiver to 0.6.8 (fixes archive corruption when saved to smbfs/cifs); · Updated sys-apps/parted to 2.1 (support for devices with sectors > 512 bytes); · New boot option "nbdboot=ip:port" to boot sysresccd from NBD; · New boot option "nfsboot=ip:/path" to boot sysresccd from NFS; · New boot option "isoloop=xxx" to boot sysresccd from an ISO on the disk with GRUB 2.
Download SystemRescueCd 1.4.0 right now from Softpedia.