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Knoppix

knopper.net

101–110 of 129 posts

Re: Knoppix

#101
The number of times I rescued data off of broken Windows installations with Knoppix is BIG!

And, I always looked like the hero when I got someone's photos or important business data off to a USB key or similar.

As others have pointed out, not a surprise I ended up in DevOps/SRE given the above.

Re: Knoppix

#102
I have begged Klaus to update Knoopix. I'll send money.

GO FUND KLAUS.

PLEASE.

Re: Knoppix

#103

Super nostalgic for me just to see the name. My computing teacher gave me a Knoppix LiveCD when I was about 18 and I immediately fell in love with Linux. Within weeks I was (repeatedly) attempting to install Gentoo on my first computer that I built. What a wonderful project!

It took me a while to put it together why Knoppix rang a bell. It's probably been 20 years that I last used it, but fond memories indeed!

Re: Knoppix

#104
Exactly 20 years ago I bought a low-end laptop from a leading French online big-box store (RueDuCommerce.com). Instead of Windows the laptop came with a Linux CD. If only such discoveries were still possible today! The distro was Kanotix, a variant of Knoppix with better hardware support. I had been struggling with Suse and was bowled over by how much easier `apt` was. And that was how I came to use Debian and Ubuntu for two decades.

Re: Knoppix

#107
Oh wow, they are still around! I used to keep a Knoppix disk around for times when my desktop would run out of space and wouldn't boot (if I remember right). Boot it with Knoppix, delete some files, and then boot it normally!

Re: Knoppix

#108

I used knoppix (and later SLAX) in high school to reboot shared computers (library, labs, etc) and then extract the SAM file from the C:\ drive. I would shuttle the file home on a USB stick and crack it overnight. After doing this on a handful of computers I ended up having virtually every teacher/admin password in the school, including the domain admin which was no shit all lowercase "north". The crack was so fast f…

I built a fake Novell login screen using VB6, it would save the users credentials to disk in plaintext, and then reboot, presenting the correct login screen which would work.

I ended up scraping a whole bunch of credentials, even teacher creds, but they were always permissioned. Math teacher had a single folder where math stuff was dumped but couldn't escape that.

One day we were sitting in one of the computer labs, and written on the board was just:

U: training P: training

with no effort having been made to erase it.

That turned out to be effectively complete teacher level access. They couldn't decide what to do with a bunch of student teachers so just gave them unnamed creds with access to all subjects. And they left the account active for 12 months after the training program. By then, we had scavved up the credentials of a teacher who had been at the school since its inception, and thus had done every job and had the same sort of teacher god rights. His password was just redrocket or something silly.

I had exams, exam answers, notes on student performance, basically everything possible for 3 years. I am so glad there was no logging or anything sensible or I would have been expelled too.

Re: Knoppix

#109
I hacked up a (not SMP-safe!) compressed loopback driver for a now-forgotten startup's "bootable business card" rescue disk. Over a year later I received an email from someone wanting to use it who was trying to port it forward.

When someone on my team started playing with this new Knoppix thing I was blown away: not just a rescue disk but a full-on distribution!

Moral: publish your hacks!

Hey, I found the email:

Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 02:17:47 +0200 From: Klaus Knopper To: Paul.Russell@linuxcare.com.au Subject: Compressed Loopback device Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0pre3i Sender: rusty@linuxcare.com.au

Hello Mr. Russel,

I'm trying to use your compressed loopback device as found on the LinuxCare rescue CD-Rom, for my selfconfiguring Linux distribution that runs entirely from CD (including XFree and KDE).

Unfortunately, the version that I got of the cloop device seems to act quite instable (of course I recompiled it for Kernel 2.2.15, which should not differ all too much from 2.2.14). I blame it on the fact that the file handle is being read from stdin of insmod, but it could be something different.

With an SMP-Kernel, cloop.o crashes immediately on insmod when calling fget(0). With a non-SMP kernel, it kills the kernel block buffer system, shutting down all other block devices as well, when accessing certain large files on an ext2 filesystem within the compressed block device file. It seems that the ll_rw_block() routine fails in that case, and wait_for_buffer() never returns, locking up something in the kernel block buffer management.

Do you maybe have a newer version of cloop that I can start working on? Btw, I found and fixed the bug in extract_compressed_fs.c, but I think it would really be nice if the sources for the whole package could be downloaded from LinuxCare somewhere without having to get the whole CD-Rom image.

If I find the cloop lockup-bug before you have time to answer, I will send a patch.

Regards

                -Klaus Knopper
--- Klaus Knopper LinuxTag 2000 - Europes largest Linux Expo
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