When your server should not crash

Had a server crash yesterday. Don’t know if it was due to faulty hardware or
something with the OS, but it came at
the exact wrong moment.

I was installing OpenBSD 4.2 on a remote
system to which I have absolutely no physical access. I created a 64 bit image
with qemu on my laptop, installed OpenBSD in it, and deployed it on the remote
system. After that, I partitioned and labelled the remote hard disk and
started moving /home, /usr and /var from the initial image to their brand new
filesystems/partitions.


mount /dev/wd0e /mnt
cd /usr; dump 0f - . | (cd /mnt; restore -rf - )
cd /mnt/usr
mv * ..
cd ..
rmdir usr
cd /
umount /mnt
mv usr usr.old
mkdir usr
mount /dev/dw0e /usr


I fired up $EDITOR to add my new /usr to /etc/fstab and at that exact moment
the machine crashed and kicked me out…

No problem you’d say. Just reboot it and continue from there. Think again.

Where does sshd live?