Hrmpf rescue system, built on Void Linux | Hacker News Reader

Hrmpf rescue system, built on Void Linux

github.com

71 pointssmasher16434 comments

I'll be taking particular note of this rescue system on the basis of the identity of the person who has created it. They're someone I've come across more than once in the open source world and definitely have respect for. I'd also recommend mblaze which is the primary tool I use for reading mail.

Agreed, Leah is a great person and has been a boon to the Void community. In fact the entire Void team is full of amazing individuals, which is a big reason why it's (in my opinion) the best Linux distro overall.

Not to mention their blogs, especially https://leahneukirchen.org/trivium/

FYI this ships with zfs modules precompiled, if you're into that sort of thing.

https://github.com/leahneukirchen/hrmpf/commit/dcc35b75676f3...

That is really useful. Having to build an archiso every time I accidentally pacman to a kernel version that breaks zfs is annoying. I’ve only done it twice but still.

Why not just build once and then keep the USB for emergencies?

I mean I do keep them but they get too old eventually and then they won’t mount the pool, or will only mount it read-only.

Both ZFS updates and pacman breaking are rare enough that I forgot that would happen. Though using this rescue system would work, there's also a group that maintains a script to grab the correct ZFS module for a running archiso, might come in handy for you.

https://github.com/eoli3n/archiso-zfs

Currently dealing with a zfs cachefile issue on my nas, where hrmpf has been instrumental in letting me backup data and regenerate a cachefile from my macbook.

How does this compare to SystemRescue ?

Hrmpf has seen no release for the past 8 months https://github.com/leahneukirchen/hrmpf/releases where SystemRescue is updated regularly https://www.system-rescue.org/Changes-x86/ .

First off... It's a system rescue tool... Have there been any massive advancements in the state of the art of system rescue in the past 8 months that need to be integrated into this tool?

Secondly, since this is void mklive based, whenever you run it, you get the current state of packages. This means that the actual programs are never really going to be out of date at time of building. The project would only need to be updated to update the few boot utilities which are included in the iso, or to update the LTS kernel included.

To add a little to that second part, I'd say this is really meant to be "built on your own", following that brief example at the end of the README. The releases are more of a convenience thing.

You will need Void's package manager XBPS installed, though. It can be harmlessly installed on other distros and won't (shouldn't?) interfere with the host package manager.

> It can be harmlessly installed on other distros and won't (shouldn't?) interfere with the host package manager.

That's nice. Good to know.

Yep xbps can be installed on other distros without causing issues. I believe the void project even distributes static musl binaries.

Good. On games, I'd add a SDL-less build of Frotz with some z-machine libre games such as Dungeon or All Things Devour.

Also, a cgames package for Void would be nice, csokoban it's perfect to play on slow recovering.

I'll add ffmpeg, sox and visidata too as they are the perfect suite for media and office suite files. MPV and Mplayer work on the framebuffer, too.

Optional dependencies for visidata: https://www.visidata.org/docs/formats/

Finally another must have tool: gnuplot and calc. Because often you need to do some graphs and calculations. And maybe bitlbee listening on localhost, with libpurple support. IM and IRC'ing for support it's unvaluable.

Oh, a quick and dirty ebook reader, with unzip and lynx:

    #/bin/sh
    unzip -qcp "$1" "*ml" "*.htm"   | lynx -force-html -dump -stdin -nolist | less -r  -M +Gg

Project name looks like it was inspired by Grml :-)

Yeah first thing I thought. It also sounds like it overlaps in functionality. I've used GRML for rescue stuff for many years. But this might be interesting too. One thing I'd love to have is to preload since defaults into the image. Like launching an SSH Daemon with a given private key so I can fix a system without a monitor

Iirc there was a time where grml just was not up to date anymore? I somewhat remember that it did not support btrfs at some point.

Could be, I never used btrfs.

I do use ZFS heavily though, so that would definitely be a point for me. I see Hrmpf does have it so I'll check it out.

Grml had a bit of a gap between the december 2018 release and the june 2020 release.

In German "hrmpf" is an exclamation and expression of frustration, with a possible connotation of acceptance that something has indeed gone wrong. So it’s a very apt name for a rescue system :)

The percentage of consonants in this word induces serious amounts of Angstschweiß :)

[laughs in Czech] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Str%C4%8D_prst_skrz_krk

edit: wonder if we have any Welsh speakers here actually

"Blb vlk pln žbrnd zdrhl hrd z mlh Brd skrz vrch Smrk v čtvrť srn Krč."

7 years of study and this language still terrifies me.

Ok... and here I was thinking that a single word without vowels in Slovenian (Trst, the Slovenian name of the Italian city Trieste) was remarkable. Guess I have to reconsider that...

Yugoslavia was famed for its critical vowel shortage:

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/clinton-deploys-v...

... However, speaking as a resident of Czechia, it's worse here.

Consider that quote. The word "čtvrť" means _quarter_, as in Latin Quarter or Arab Quarter. It differs from the word "čtvrt" (meaning a quarter of a pizza, say) by the half a diacritic on the final letter T: ť. That diacritic modifies the following vowel — for example the famous shoe company is not Bata (bar-ta) but Baťa (bar-tya).

In "čtvrť" the háček modifies the following vowel that isn't there and thus changes the meaning of the word.

Czech is czallenging.

Bonus complication while we're talking Czech orthography - "ch" is considered to be one letter. Have been stumped on some křižovky because of that.

Yeah it's a bit of a tongue twister if you have to say this out loud. I'm just continually encountering words I've never heard and either being completely lost or trying to relate them to something I already know. Like in that sentence:

- don't know what a "žbrnd" is

- "zdrhl" is the l-participle of some verb that I don't know

- "hrd" is not something I've seen (is it related to "hrdina" - hero - maybe?)

- "Brd" no idea

- "srn" might be like "srnec" (kind of deer) but if I heard it in a sentence I wouldn't make that connection

- "Krč" - I've seen "Krčma" as a form of pub, but idk if this word refers to that

These guesses I made are possibly miles off the mark :D

You're good! Better than me, but then I started old. 46 is a hell of an age to tackle your first Slavic language.

There's a breakdown here on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/czech/comments/1l3tdw/new_longest_c...

Brd, Smrk and Krč are places. "Zdrhl": escaped; "hrd": proudly; "srn" is a doe, a female deer.

Nobody seems to know "žbrnd", but this is admittedly purposely difficult language, showing off how much is possible without vowels.

Ha nice - so I got one (almost) right :D

Anyway it's good to know I'm not the only one struggling through. Keep it up!

Its time to do crowdfunding and gift them a few vowels.

That's because it's not an actual word, it's more like a cartoonish onomatopoeia.

Both are German names, following the same specific sense of naming. And looking around, Hrmpf seems to get inspirations from Grml, maybe even is a clone with different foundation?

Those shell scripts are nearly perfectly laid out and readable.

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