[cobalt-users] RaQ2 OS Recovery

[Ed Booher <ebooher@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Howdy howdy,

This is a hypothetical question.  I've come into my current work
place very recently, and was kind of handed the keys to two
Cobalt RaQ2 servers that we have in the office.  No one here is
really that savvy with them, and all we truly have is one little
"Users Manual" that came with the RaQ.  Truth be known, my
company didn't order them.  A company that we were hosting some
time ago and long before I started working here ordered them,
when they left our services they decided they didn't need them. 
I.e. they stopped hosting other people's web sites to concentrate
completely on their own.

A week ago one of the RaQ's went down and needed to be cold
booted.  Which is ok, one of the technicians here was kind enough
to come in and reboot it and baby sit it to make sure it came
back up.  But it got me thinking.  If something, (or someone),
were to cause the OS to become corrupt and there was a need to
recover, or flat out format and reinstall how would I do
something like this.

As far as I can tell there is no OS CD, and even if there were,
there is no connection to the RaQ to plug in any type of CD
drive.  Though I do believe that there is a console connection. 
Does the OS live entirely in Flash RAM off of the base hard disk
so that it can not be corrupted?  Is it like a standard Linux
installation, i.e. it's on the hard disk with control of the boot
sector and something akin to lilo even though there is no monitor
or keyboard to tell it to go into single user mode?

Ah, now the true colors shine through.  I have been "chomping at
the bit" as it were to delve very deeply into the second RaQ2 my
company has.  There is currently absolutely nothing on it, but
the primary RaQ2 attempts to back up to it.  Though we've never
actually been successful in restoring a back up file.  I want to
start doing some wild and crazy things to the secondary RaQ in an
attempt to better understand the piece of hard ware and so that I
can implement a mirroring scheme so that the secondary RaQ is
identical to the primary in every respect and the primary RaQ
writes all changes to both systems so that if the primary dies
the secondary will still be online.

I'm terrified of messing something up to the point of
reinstallation, and not having any way to do it.

Any thoughts?

Ed Booher
Network Engineer
One Call Internet
http://www.onecall.net/