Comment USB thumb drive and udev (Score 1) 347
I was in a similar situation a while ago, and maybe my experience can help you.
My home server (P4, by the way) was running headless and I was afraid I can lock myself out (wrong iptables rule or something) or the IP address settings could get screwed up, etc. etc. I don't even have a monitor, so inserting the graphics card back in isn't an option.
The solution was a USB thumb drive I had, and a modified udev script for mass storage, so it would execute a shell script with a particular name from the root folder of the drive. If something did get screwed up, you just open your text editor, write the commands to be executed, and save it on your flash drive. You even can redirect standard output to a file on the drive.
It kept me safe for years, although if udev can't start, you may have a problem :)
My home server (P4, by the way) was running headless and I was afraid I can lock myself out (wrong iptables rule or something) or the IP address settings could get screwed up, etc. etc. I don't even have a monitor, so inserting the graphics card back in isn't an option.
The solution was a USB thumb drive I had, and a modified udev script for mass storage, so it would execute a shell script with a particular name from the root folder of the drive. If something did get screwed up, you just open your text editor, write the commands to be executed, and save it on your flash drive. You even can redirect standard output to a file on the drive.
It kept me safe for years, although if udev can't start, you may have a problem