On Mar 25, 2024, at 13:43, Thomas Cameron <thomas.cameron(a)camerontech.com> wrote:
On 3/25/24 11:38, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>> On Mon, 2024-03-25 at 11:07 -0500, Thomas Cameron wrote:
>> dmesg > /dev/nvme1n1
> What's that about?
> poc
To further clarify, my system uses NVMe drives (/dev/nvme0n1 and /dev/nvme1n1). So when I
do dmesg > /dev/nvme1n1 as root, it overwrites the first few hundred k of the NVMe
disk, nuking the partition tables and boot instructions and the like. Then when I reboot,
it causes my machine to PXE boot. You can nuke any drive by writing to the first few
sectors, so it could have been /dev/sda, /dev/vda, /dev/xvda, or whatever.
On any modern system that uses UEFI, you can just use “efibootmgr -n ####” to temporarily
set the next boot target to be the PXE boot entry (which has its own unique entry, replace
#### with its number). Probably also worth deleting the existing entry to boot into Fedora
at the same time.
Wiping the partition table doesn’t always guarantee that the next boot will be PXE, which
is why I liked to automate it specifically.
No need to delete or wipe any bootloaders or partition tables, although it probably
doesn’t hurt. I had a kickstart that preserved custom stuff like the krb5 keytab between
reloads in the kickstart %pre section, so I didn’t want to just nuke the filesystem.
--
Jonathan Billings