Lenny archeology

Some archeology done on a hard drive i found labeled lenny2-28/1/07.

I assume the label means it's the second iteration of the lenny machine. It was named after Leonard Peltier.

Basic inventory

The hard drive is weirdly partitionned:

root@marcos:/home/anarcat# sfdisk -l /dev/sdd
Disk /dev/sdd: 14946 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

   Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd1   *      0+   1336    1337-  10739421   a5  FreeBSD
/dev/sdd2       6525    9728    3204   25736130   83  Linux
                start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,255,63)
/dev/sdd3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sdd4       1337    6524    5188   41672610    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
                start: (c,h,s) expected (1023,254,63) found (1023,255,63)
/dev/sdd5       1337+   3914    2578-  20707753+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdd6       3915+   4038     124-    995998+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdd7       4039+   6524    2486-  19968763+  83  Linux
/dev/sdd8          0+   1305-   1306-  10485760
/dev/sdd9       1305+   1336      32-    253661

The linux kernel sees this as:

[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] scsi 61:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Maxtor 4 X3KE             1TU0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg4 type 0
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: [sdd] 240121728 512-byte logical blocks: (122 GB/114 GiB)
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 00 38 00 00
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: [sdd] Asking for cache data failed
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: [sdd] Asking for cache data failed
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013]  sdd: sdd1 sdd2 sdd4 < sdd5 sdd6 sdd7 >
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013]  sdd1: <bsd: sdd8 sdd9 >
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: [sdd] Asking for cache data failed
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ven. déc. 27 18:53:53 2013] sd 61:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI disk

I could mount the following partitions:

/dev/sdd2                    25G   18G  5,3G  78% /mnt
/dev/sdd7                    19G   11G  7,8G  57% /mnt/home
/dev/sdd8                   9,7G  4,7G  4,3G  53% /mnt2

It seems I couldn't mount the FAT32 partitions: good riddance, this is the last remaining Windows filesystem I have on a hard drive, excluding flash card storage for my cameras, which contains only data. This means I have been using an exclusively FLOSS operating system since at least 2007, but I was dating that back to much earlier.

FreeBSD partition

This one is just plain weird. First off, while it's a BSD partition, it doesn't actually contain a BSD system. It looks more like a Debian installation, indeed:

root@marcos:/mnt2# cat etc/issue
Debian GNU/kFreeBSD squeeze/sid \n \l

My guess is this is my first experiment with the Debian/kFreeBSD port - in 2007, not bad! Indeed, the /boot directory contains a 7.3 FreeBSD kernel. This would explain the filesystem format as well.

Other than that, there doesn't seem to be much installed on this - there's no data in /home. Xorg is intalled, so there may have been a graphical interface, but there's a core dump of xdm in /, so it's unclear if this was working. I do remember getting X11 to work however, so maybe that's all this did.

Linux partitions

There are two linux partitions, one for / and another for /home, which makes me think that lenny was actually a workstation or a laptop.

Indeed, I can see traces of a web browser install, something I didn't run on servers previously. This install was running Debian squeeze/sid. A webserver was installed, but only work and personnal projects are found in /var/www, no virtual hosts are configured, so this is clearly not my main server, but a workstation.

Those projects are work-related projects, from before I started working at Koumbit - some freelance projects, other related to my previous job. This includes the original phptimetracker. There's also a Drupal 4.7-beta4 install in there.

There's also a copy of the long-lost wikigraphe source code

There's a copy of the Koumbit wiki from 2004, already converted to MoinMoin. Back then, the wiki was only 84MB and 213 pages.

Finally, an interesting bit is the marvin-in-a-vserver backup, which I sucked into the current child of marvin, marcos, in the backup directory. It seems there are copies of long-lost email folders from 2001 (!!) in there which would be interesting to peruse. So I saved this before destruction.

Oddly enough, the /var/log directory indicates that lenny was still in use in 2011! So this backup is younger than I though, if those timestamps are right.

The laptop was shared amongst at least 7 accounts and also had a guest account. So this was clearly a workstation, probably used right up until the point when i merged marvin into my workstation, to create marcos.

After a little exploration, I made the mistake of moving stuff off the drive, at which point the drive seemed to panic:

Message from syslogd@marcos at Dec 27 19:44:40 ...
 kernel:[1848440.418857] journal commit I/O error

.. and disappeared. After a few attempts, I was able to bring it back up.

The files I transfered off that drive are in /srv/backup/lenny.

The drive is now wiped.

Created . Edited .