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.

The Finnix Information Center is staffed by a highly trained crack team of professional shirt-wearers. From left is Kentucky Friedkin[1], Eli Nexen, and Liz Rexie.

They take their jobs quite seriously.

The first floor office contains a desk area with promotional material (Finnix CDs and clothing) and other objects. The main room contains plenty of seating room, and a propaganda projector that switches between multiple screens (currently an overview of Finnix and a screenshot).

Clicking on the CD in the laptop will give you a (virtual) copy of the CD. Inside it is a notecard with information about Finnix, as well as a landmark of the center.

The CD is wearable, and is fully copyable, modifiable, and transferable to others.

All computers in the info center run Finnix, of course.

Upstairs is the demo lab, with 5 Finnix workstations. Currently they all just give you a copy of the CD when touched, but I am exploring other options to make them more interactive.

Also upstairs is a Cray. Yes, it is on fire.

The Finnix property is located on the mainland, but is located immediately west of a protected beach, meaning the land between my plot and the water cannot be developed. I came across the land by chance, and got a great deal on it. The second floor patio provides an unobstructed view of the sunrise over the water.

The land is 1536 m², which is a bit large for my needs, but was picked for technical reasons[2]. To fill the unused space, I developed a recreation area. The campfire can be lit or extinguished (and casts a nice glow at night), and has several logs surrounding it for sitting. The natural top pool is rather deep, and includes several poseballs for floating, or sitting on the surrounding cliffs. The water flows down (again, with poseballs to let you sit in the rapids pools) to a shallow pond.

Oh, and the center includes its own man-made moon.

With hidden dance platforms.

So that's how it stands right now. The center will most likely be evolving over time, so come on by.

Notes:
[1] Yes, that's a pun.
[2] The Long Story: Second Life is made up entirely of primitive objects, or prims. Each prim can be molded, have textures applied, scripts and triggers added, and combined with other prims to make logical objects. For example, a 4-legged barstool could be 5 prims: 4 cuboids for the legs, plus a stubby cylinder for the seat. Most sims (regions) allow 117 prims per 512 m². That's really not that many, but Second Life isn't terribly efficient, and can sometimes get rather slow, even with that prim density. Layout-wise, the Finnix center could easily fit on a 1024 m² plot, and could get by on a 512 m² plot, but the prim limit would make it hard to design on either of those lot sizes. So I got a 1536 m² plot, giving me 351 prims. That way, most of the prims are used on the info center side of the plot, with the recreation area using a rather low density of prims, while still looking nice. Currently I've used 299 prims (and that's with pretty conservative planning), leaving 52 for future use.

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

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.

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.

• 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.

(Thanks, Nathan!)

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.