Fixit-bot Jonni Bidwell reveals how rescue distros can quickly diagnose and cure diverse Linux problems.

L inux has a reputation for reliability. People band around phrases like ‘rock-solid stability’, ‘outstanding resilience’ and sometimes even ‘unbreakable’, but often people’s experience of Linux runs entirely counter to this. Whether it’s your first install or your latest orchestrated update to your compute cluster, sometimes Linux just falls over. There can be lots of reasons for this (hardware failure, user failure, competing operating systems, buggy BIOSes, cosmic rays) and sometimes it seems like the only resolution is a complete reinstall.

This is never a satisfactory solution. Partly because you might never find out what was wrong (and it might still be wrong), but mostly because it takes time and effort – and who has time or effort nowadays? Our DVD this month has a delightful selection of rescue distros, and if the worst should happen to your box then they’ll help you get it up and running again.

Dual-booting with Windows is a common cause for consternation. That’s why we always recommend to keep it on a separate drive (or not install it all). There are plenty of reports of Windows updates kindly removing Linux bootloaders from people’s systems. This is easy to fix, as we’ll see (SystemRescue can do it in a jiffy) but to the untrained eye it appears as though one’s Linux install (and all the data on it) has entirely vanished.

There are also enough reports of said Windows updates corrupting Linux volumes to make us wary. We recommend unplugging such drives while the Redmond OS does its thing, but if this advice comes to you too late, then hopefully this feature and our Rescue Toolkit can be your saviour.

S erendipity comes in many forms, and we were putting this feature together it came in the form of a Microsoft security bulletin. These don’t usually contain good news and this one was no exception. A flaw in the Windows print spooler service was discovered that could lead to local privilege escalation and, worse, remote code execution. The bad news continued: details of the flaw (dubbed PrintNightmare) were accidentally publicised (on Microsoft’s own GitHub ironically) leading to widespread exploitation.