# cu just came to my rescue



## zirias@ (Jun 20, 2015)

Setting: I operate my own private XEN server, it's quite old, so dom0 is still an old Debian using a "hand-patched" kernel with dom0-patches adapted from SuSE (this was the time before pv-ops). This box does everything I need, including a VM for routing/firewall which "owns" the single physical NIC exclusively. It doesn't have a video card nor onboard video, why waste energy for this ... but as the harddisk is encrypted, I need to enter a passphrase through serial terminal if the whole box ever needs to boot (which should be, and in practice is, close to never). As a serial terminal, I use my netbook ... I recently also used it for experimenting with FreeBSD CURRENT. Bad luck, a few weeks ago, some combination of KDE device notifier / mounter and a USB stick lead to a crash and rendered the system unbootable ("No operating system found").

So, tonight (friday-saturday ... ARRRGH), the NIC driver of my router/firewall VM went crazy and networking was down, completely -- every switch in the house was just flickering. Sure, go to the basement with the netbook and reload the driver via serial console ... if only the netbook was operational! For some minutes, I felt like "damn, a weekend without internet connection" -- next chance to download and install something on the netbook would be at work on monday.

Then I remembered I still had the FreeBSD-CURRENT installer image on a USB stick. And well, what should I say: This is JUST GREAT, because cu(1) is part of the base system! Try and find something like this in a Linux installer image. Some (a lot) might say a terminal tool like this is so very outdated -- it is NOT, it saved my weekend  Please, NEVER remove this from the base system 

Now, maybe I find the motivation to TRY to fix my FreeBSD installation on the netbook ... would it be enough to rewrite the MBR? I'll see ...


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## Oko (Jun 20, 2015)

Zirias said:


> Then I remembered I still had the FreeBSD-CURRENT installer image on a USB stick. And well, what should I say: This is JUST GREAT, because cu(1) is part of the base system!



I don't know about the Linux but from OpenBSD man pages we learn


> The cu command appeared in 4.2BSD.


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