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Article posted on Nov 3

Finnix: Compact Linux distribution for system administrators

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on November 3, 2009, 3:16 pm

In July 2008, Cory Buford wrote a nice review of Finnix for linux.com, shortly after the release of Finnix 92.0. Unfortunately, the review did not survive linux.com's transition to the Linux Foundation later that year, but I was able to save a copy, and with permission from the author, it has been reproduced here. Enjoy!

Finnix is a live CD distribution designed to assist system administrators in such tasks as system recovery and network monitoring. Based on Debian testing and Linux kernel 2.6, Finnix helps with filesystem and partition manipulation as well as with data recovery, installation of other operating systems, and boot record repair.

Finnix works on both x86/AMD64 and PowerPC systems. The latest release, version 92.0, fixes the Debian SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) vulnerability that was present in previous releases.

One nice thing about the distribution is its small size. Using SquashFS, the entire 300MB distribution was compressed into a bootable distribution just a little over 100MB. Its compact size notwithstanding, Finnix includes the latest technologies and applications for system administrators, including Logical Volume Manager 2 (LVM2), encrypted partitions, and multiple filesystem support.

To start using Finnix, download it from the author's site and burn it to a CD. Since you will likely use this distribution to recover systems -- the main intent of Ryan Finnie when he created it -- booting it as a live CD is the preferred option. If you want to use the CD drive for other purposes, such as using Finnix tools to back up on a CD, you can also load the distribution into RAM; just make sure you have enough RAM -- preferably at least 512MB -- to hold the entire package.

You can also install Finnix to a hard drive using the fairly complex documentation given on the author's site. Another option, once you're inside Finnix, is to run the finnix-thumbdrive script to create a bootable Finnix USB drive.

When you boot Finnix you will see a menu with several options. Although Finnix is designed to automatically detect the type of processor (either x86/AMD64 or PowerPC), you can still choose one yourself. You can run other useful tools -- including Memtest86+, a utility for memory hardware diagnostics -- from the boot menu. If you want to boot multiple operating systems on the system disk, you can use Smart Boot Manager, and for those who miss the DOS command-line interface, you have FreeDOS.

After you select a system, Finnix boots with no problems and with all hardware detected. You are then presented with a simple command-line interface (CLI); no graphical user interface (GUI) is available.

Finnix tools inside

Despite the absence of a GUI, Finnix's wealth of tools and utilities should be enough to satisfy system administrators or others tasked with system recovery. While recovery offerings such as Hiren's BootCD are effective, Finnix can be more flexible, especially when you use the utilities along with proper scripting to their full extent.

Among the available disk and partition manipulation and recovery tools is Partimage, which is comparable to Norton Ghost in functionality but also lets users back up or restore an image from a network server. In addition, Finnix includes the data recovery tool ddrescue.

Finnix offers many options for creating or manipulating filesystems. For filesystems such as ext2 and ReiserFS, there are e2fsprogs and reiserfsprogs, respectively. If you need to access or recover data from an NTFS partition, NTFS-3G and ntfsprogs are available. Also included is hfsutils, which supports Macintosh HFS volumes. Other supported filesystems include Unionfs, Cramfs and Squashfs. For volume management, there is Logical Volume Manager (LVM), which also supports LVM2, and EVMS (Enterprise Volume Management System), which supports NTFS and FAT, among others. Also included is Parted, for extending Linux partitions.

In addition to its disk manipulation and management support, Finnix is host to many monitoring, benchmarking, and diagnostic tools. lm-sensors can monitor system temperature, voltage, and fan status. For benchmarking and diagnostics, memtester stress-tests the memory system and helps find intermittent faults caused by overheating, unregulated power, and so on. To test how well your hard disk system is performing, Bonnie++ is included. For a complete stress test of the system, including the CPU, memory, and IO, a tool called stress is available.

A system recovery distribution such as Finnix would not be complete if it did not allow you to back up recovered data on external media. Finnix supports CDs and DVDs as backup media and includes a range of burning utilities, such as cdbackup, wodim, and dvdrecord, to make this process as fast and easy as possible. Although most of us are used to burning data with a GUI tool, burning data using commands is not that hard as long as you know the proper format, or filesystem, to be used. If you ever have difficulties, you can always issue the man command followed by the utility name for detailed explanations, or just search for the tool on the Internet to find its related documentation. Experienced users can also control SCSI tape drives for backup and restore using the mt-st tool. You can perform incremental backups over the network, and restore files, using rdiff-backup.

Since Finnix is for system administrators, it includes popular and useful networking tools such as Nmap, for scanning and auditing networks, and tcpdump, a powerful network packet monitoring tool. Also included are SNMP tools such as snmp; the IPTraf interactive LAN traffic monitor; network filtering and firewalls such as ipchains and iptables; various VPN tools for PPTP, IPSec, and SSL; and the common network accessibility tools ping and traceroute. Common Linux network interface management commands such as ethtool and ifdownup are included as well, as are tools for enabling network services such as NFS, Samba, and FTP.

I tested the partition management tools, especially Partimage and ddrescue. Although I encountered some problems because I did not use some of the parameters, I successfully created an image of a partition, stored it on a network drive, and recovered some data from a corrupted disk. I also tested the CD- and DVD-burning tools in the command line and, following the detailed explanation of the burning parameters, was able to burn data to a DVD. I found the Joe editor handy for editing configuration files; other editors, such as sed and Zile, are also provided. To see all Finnix's packages, visit the official site.

A system administrator tool

Finnix 92.0 is a useful distribution for system administrators. With many tools covering jobs such as data recovery, hardware diagnostics and benchmarking, network services, and monitoring, this distribution can greatly help an administrator. However, Finnix is not for the average user accustomed to booting up a system and doing things graphically. While Finnix's CLI-based tools are not that complex, one must have the necessary knowledge to fully understand how to use them.

I was satisfied with the packages included in this distribution, especially the filesystem management and recovery utilities, as well as the CLI backup tools. For serious network troubleshooting, I would recommend instead distributions such as Network Security Toolkit or BackTrack, which are specifically intended for such purposes.

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Aug 11

Finnix 93.0 released

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 11, 2009, 12:01 am

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of version 93.0 for the x86/AMD64, PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms.

Finnix 93.0 itself is a maintenance release, but due to the length of time between Finnix 92.1 and 93.0, the time between Debian upstream updates warranted a major version number bump. New features include Linux kernel 2.6.30, and updated upstream software.

• Home page: http://www.finnix.org/
• Download: http://www.finnix.org/Download
• Release notes: http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_93.0_release_notes

• 3 Comments
• Posted in Announcements, Finnix

Article posted on Aug 7

State of the Finnix

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 7, 2009, 1:30 pm

Reposting an email I sent recently:

Yes, I started a few weeks ago after a (too long) hiatus. 2.6.30 kernel, which is looking nice. (SquashFS is now included in mainline. That means UnionFS is now the only kernel patch that is absolutely required.) The latest Debian testing stuff itself is pretty stable, but managed to break pretty much all of Finnix's init scripts in one way or another, but it's coming along. Unfortunately Debian's base packages are a little larger, and the kernels have ballooned between 2.6.26 and 2.6.30, so this will probably be the largest Finnix to date, about 125MiB for x86 at current estimates. It's still well under Finnix's long term goals (never to exceed 185MiB, the size of a mini-CD), but unfortunately there really isn't anything to trim.

Still, I'm happy with what the next release is shaping up to be. Looks good!

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• Posted in Development, Finnix

Article posted on Jan 13

Finnix in Second Life

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 13, 2009, 9:35 pm

That's right, Finnix now has a home in Second Life. This was mostly used as an excuse to learn the build system. While, personally, Second Life was rather boring from a "visitor's" point of view (I think I initially signed on about 3 years ago, and came back to visit a few times per year), I quickly learned that owning land and building was actually the fun part. So on with the tour...
Read the rest of this entry »

• 1 Comment
• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Dec 3

Finnix 92.1 released

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 3, 2008, 8:15 pm

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of version 92.1 for the x86/AMD64, PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms.

Finnix 92.1 is a regular maintenance release. New features include Linux kernel 2.6.26, updated upstream software, and x86 boot menu cleanups.

• Home page: http://www.finnix.org/
• Download: http://www.finnix.org/Download
• Release notes: http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_92.1_release_notes

• 3 Comments
• Posted in Announcements, Finnix

Article posted on Nov 24

Finnix 92.1 soon…

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on November 24, 2008, 5:20 pm

... or the "I waited 5 months for this?" release.

Hopefully a release announcement will be made tomorrow; otherwise it will be next week, as I will be on vacation for the Thanksgiving holiday. Finnix 92.1 will be a maintenance release, with a dist-upgraded environment, a "new" kernel, 2.6.26 (2.6.27 has not yet entered Debian due to the Lenny freeze, and I didn't deem it important enough to break with procedure and use a vanilla kernel this time around), and a few small fixes.

Also, a little teaser: This will not be released with Finnix 92.1 -- it will be sometime after release -- but I will be announcing Finnix on a new architecture. Which one? It's a secret... One hint is it is an architecture I have discussed in relation to Finnix before.

(No, it's not that iPod April Fools port from 2006.)

• 1 Comment
• Posted in Development, Finnix

Article posted on Jun 28

Finnix 92.0 Released

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 28, 2008, 9:59 pm

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of version 92.0 for the x86/AMD64, PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms.

Finnix 92.0 includes updated software (including a fix for the Debian OpenSSL security vulnerability), a Linux 2.6.25 kernel, and a new, graphical boot menu.

• Home page: http://www.finnix.org/
• Download: http://www.finnix.org/Download
• Release notes: http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_92.0_release_notes

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• Posted in Announcements, Finnix

Article posted on Jun 14

Finnix 92.0 coming soon

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 14, 2008, 5:01 pm

Finnix 92.0 will be released soon. It will have a new 2.6.25 kernel, updated software, and, most visibly, a new boot menu.

There have been suggestions for a new boot menu for awhile now. I liked the idea in theory, but there were various problems with most implementations (no graphics; graphics, but no fallback to text mode; no easy way to add boot options, such as toram, testcd, etc; no way to default to 64-bit boot options). Debian's recent announcement of debian-installer for lenny beta 2 introduced a new installer boot menu system based on bootmenu.c32, which looked very nice and solved most of the problems I mentioned. However, no default 64-bit option on multi-arch CDs, which the announcement mentioned and lamented.

I used Debian's configs as a base for a Finnix test. The results were very nice, and I was ready to do as Debian did and accept that the improvements were worth the loss of 64-bit autodetection. However, an acquaintance encouraged me to look into it ("Sounds like it's time for some OPEN SOURCE MAGIC"), and within a few hours, I had a working patch.

The debian-installer guys loved it and had the patch applied within an hour, and as well, it will be in Finnix 92.0. Here's a development screenshot:

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• Posted in Development, Finnix

Article posted on Jun 2

Finnix and Debian’s OpenSSL Vulnerability

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on June 2, 2008, 1:05 am

All versions of Finnix from 89.0 to 91.1 (inclusive) contain the Debian OpenSSL predictable RNG vulnerability. The fix will be included with the next scheduled (approximately quarterly) release of Finnix in the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you use any OpenSSL-related programs (openssl itself, ssh, openvpn, etc) on Finnix, be sure to do the following as soon as you boot Finnix:

apt-get update && apt-get install libssl0.9.8

Finnix does not include any pre-generated keys, but any keys generated on Finnix with a vulnerable OpenSSL will be vulnerable.

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• Posted in Finnix

Article posted on Mar 4

Finnix 91.1 Released

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on March 4, 2008, 12:15 am

Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of version 91.1 for the x86/AMD64, PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms.

Finnix 91.1 is a bugfix and maintenance release. Memtest86+ has been upgraded to 2.01, software RAID autodetection has been fixed, and finnix-thumbdrive has been fixed with udev support and support for drives over 1GB.

Finnix 91.1 also incudes an updated 2.6.24 kernel with the Linux vmsplice exploit fixed. If you use Finnix in any environment where untrusted users are allowed local access, please do not use Finnix 88.0 - 91.0, as these versions contain vulnerable kernels.

• Home page: http://www.finnix.org/
• Download: http://www.finnix.org/Download
• Release notes: http://www.finnix.org/Finnix_91.1_release_notes

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• Posted in Announcements, Finnix