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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 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 »

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Apr 17

Finnix Trademark Update

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on April 17, 2007, 10:38 am

The Finnix trademark has been published in the Official Gazette, a USPTO weekly publication for the purpose of announcing new trademark applications and allowing the public to file oppositions against them if so needed. (Hopefully Finnix is in the clear in that regard.) At this point, Finnix should be a registered trademark within about 12 weeks if everything goes right.

You can download the 113MB PDF here if you want, but here's the relevant screenshot:

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany, Trademark

Article posted on Jan 15

Finnix 89.0 Soon

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 15, 2007, 9:12 pm

The final touches are being applied to Finnix 89.0, and will probably be released within a week. Currently I'm waiting on an update for Memtest86+: 1.70 was released this weekend, but a chipset detection flaw has forced them to announce a release of 1.71 (with the fix) "within a week". This gives me time to do some final testing and finish up a few of the non-development things that need to be done before a release.

Two of the most annoying non-development tasks are actually graphics and GPL compliance. Graphics are pretty self-explanatory: make a boot banner, CD art, etc. GPL compliance basically means I have to gather the source packages for every binary package in the release, burn them to CD, and throw that CD in my document safe for the next 3 years. Of course, nobody has actually asked for these sources yet (when you can just go to http://snapshot.debian.net and download specific versions yourself), but I do have to keep the sources around, just in case snapshot.debian.net were to disappear one day and someone needed sources to a particular package. The impetus is on me to provide these sources ultimately.

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Aug 24

Finnix Trademark Application

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 24, 2006, 1:04 am

I recently applied for registration of the Finnix trademark with the USPTO. Registration is a long process, and should be completed in 13 to 18 months. Of course this doesn't mean that I am not allowed to use the name "Finnix" yet; rather, trademark registration is designed to give you more power in asserting ownership of a mark for specific purposes (in this case, use of the name "Finnix" relating to "computer software", dating back to 1999).

If you have an even moderately popular open source project, I would strongly suggest looking into trademark registration. Registration is $275, but worth it, especially considering recent headlines. You can hire a lawyer to do the work for you, but the USPTO does have a relatively simple "self-service" application for registrations. I used their online tools for searching for existing trademarks (nothing comes even close to the name "Finnix"), and spent about an hour filling out paperwork.

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Aug 20

Mirrors Requested

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 20, 2006, 7:23 pm

Due to SourceForge problems, for 88.0 I secured primary mirroring with OSU Open Source Lab (thanks again!), and will not be using SourceForge for future releases. However, I am looking for secondary mirror sites. Here are the requirements:

• Decent connectivity (DS3 or higher)
• 24-hour availability (occasional maintenance downtime is fine, I'm talking about excluding "available 9-5" sites)
• Enough storage space and aggregate transfer for future growth, see below
• Ability to rsync from the main archive at least daily

Here is how things are looking for the archive currently:

• 1.3GiB currently, growing at an average of 1.5GiB per year
• 200GiB transfer per month, should not exceed 400GiB per month in coming years
• Releases quarterly on average
• Mostly compressed content in archives
• Current archives can be browsed at http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/finnix/; "current" is a symlink to the current release directory

If you are interested in providing mirror services, please email ryan@finnie.org. Thank you very much.

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Aug 20

Hard Drive Crash

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 20, 2006, 6:38 pm

Over the weekend, humorbot, the main x86 development machine for Finnix, suffered a hard drive crash. Thankfully, the crash wasn't absolute, and I was able to mount the dev partition read-only and copy/verify the last generated dev ISO snapshot. (All snapshots are GPG-signed, which in times like this helped make sure there was no corruption on that particular file.) This, combined with a full backup made on the 2nd, meant that thankfully no development work was lost.

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Jul 9

Black T-Shirts at CafePress

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on July 9, 2006, 3:47 pm

CafePress is now selling black t-shirts. I'm not sure of the quality, but I ordered 2 to wear at DEF CON. If they are decent quality, I'll put it on the Merchandise page.

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Jul 4

Finnix on a MacBook Pro

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on July 4, 2006, 11:16 pm

Finnix has been confirmed as bootable on a MacBook Pro 2GHz, using rEFIt. Here are the finnix-hwsubmit results. Ethernet works on the latest development snapshot (kernel 2.6.17), but not on 87.0.

(Thanks, Nathan!)

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany

Article posted on Apr 2

Finnix: On the Forefront of Ancient Hardware Technology

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on April 2, 2006, 6:59 pm

For Finnix 87.0, I decided to compile the x86 kernel with i486 support. However, that made me think that I had never tested Finnix with anything less than i686 hardware. The two i586 machines I found worked great with Finnix (an AMD K6-300 and a Pentium 166), but I couldn't find an i486 machine. I ordered one from eBay (a Cyrix 486DX2-80 with PCI motherboard and 48MB RAM), but it didn't arrive in time before final ISO images were mastered.

It arrived Friday, but upon booting it, the kernel immediately segfaulted. Turns out, an i486 will not boot at all if the kernel is compiled with SMP support, even if it has "i486" support.

I thought about including a second non-SMP kernel with the distribution, but that adds another 14MB to the ISO size, for a feature that probably nobody will use. Instead, I took advantage of Finnix's new overlay support, and created an overlay that had a new non-SMP kernel's modules in it. Then I re-created the initrd and added a "nosmp" kernel and modified the isolinux.cfg file. I booted the new modified CD and it worked great:

root@0:~# uname -a
Linux finnix 2.6.16-1-x86-nosmp-finnix #1 Sun Apr 2 05:26:53 PDT 2006 i486 GNU/Linux
root@0:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : unknown
cpu family      : 4
model           : 0
model name      : 486
stepping        : unknown
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : no
cpuid level     : -1
wp              : yes
flags           :
bogomips        : 29.44

If you want to do the same, I uploaded the modified files and tarball as finnix-87.0-nosmp.tar.bz2. Download the tarball and read the included README file. It takes about 5 lines of commands to extract the original Finnix ISO, extract the overlay into the tree, and re-create the modified tarball.

By the way, because of this, the next release of Finnix will have a kernel that is bumped back up to i586 minimum.

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• Posted in Finnix, Miscellany