Veritas VxFS Read/Write tool?

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

I've recently inherited a SCO UnixWare box whose filesystem is of type vxfs. I can mount it read-only just fine using the freevxfs driver under Linux. However, I need to edit some files on the partition to get it to boot properly. Read-only support doesn't help me any in this endeavour.

Does anybody know of a tool that can read and write to the vxfs filesystem? It doesn't have to be Linux-based, and it doesn't have to even be *NIX based. Just something that will allow me to change the files I need.

Ideally, it'd be something like a boot floppy. I'd boot with the floppy, edit the files, reboot, and continue on my merry way!

[dkeav]

thats a tough one alc, does unixware have a rescue boot or anything like that in like an images directory, something that could atleast be copied off of it

[stiles]

Veritas has a LKM for VxFS (and VxVM), but it may be hard to get ahold of (it's not free).

Does the SCO cd double as a rescue disk? Yea you probablly don't have that though :/

[dkeav]

well i found this, it sounds like what you need, just hope you can get it to work

http://www.penguin.cz/~mhi/fs/vxfs/

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

I do believe there are images somewhere on the machine. If I can find out where, I can pull them off and make them using dd. If anyone knows where to find them, I'll make cookies for them.

Also, I think the SCO CD doubles as a rescue CD. But that's a non-issue, as I don't have the CD. Sadly, I threw away my UW 7.1 CDs because I was positive I'd never need them... :(

My problem is that I was given this machine and a literal truckload of dumb terminals, line printers, and other neat stuff. The only things I didn't get were install CDs and the root password. I've gotten John the Ripper to crack about 24 of the 130-some odd account passwords on the machine, but not the root password. If I could edit /etc/shadow and cut + paste another user's known password hash in place of root's password hash, I'd have root access to the box restored.

dkeav: Thanks for the link to vxtools, but it's read-only. I can read the drives just fine-- it's copying the files back that I'm having a problem with.

stiles: Do you know of a link to that LKM? I searched all over Veritas' site, and couldn't find any links about it. If it's reasonable, I'm not against paying money to get this done.

[dkeav]

you know, HPUX would be another resource to check out, for rescue cd or tools, since i think they rely on vxfs too

[dkeav]

can you search for a .dsk file, that would be one possible image

[stiles]

Yea they almost don't even tell you what their products are. The VERITAS Foundation Suite (http://www.veritas.com/products/category/ProductDetail.jhtml?productId=foundation) is the VxFS and VxVM combo. Veritas and reasonable pricing almost never go together (their volume management system competes pretty well in the SAN market and they are proud of that). Well I guess that is relative, if you were an enterprise customer looking to run Linux in a SAN environment yea I can see that, but for a recovery of an aged system, ouch. I guess you could try to contact Veritas and convey that your interest is for educational reasons and see if they will give you a break.

If you have some Sun hardware you may find you may try to find a try before you buy copy of "Solstice Enterprise Volume Manager" which is the Sun rebranding of VxFS and VxVM. It's kind of a long shot but who knows.