Hey immutable repo ISO, do you just ruined my portable drive ?

kristofpoppe · 2023-12-02T16:14:05+00:00

Hi everybody. I’ve put a small blogpost togethers about an issue I experienced last week with the all-in-one ISO to create a hardenened immutable repo. This ISO was GA’ed during VeeamOn during the session of @Rick Vanover@HannesK and Christoph Meyer. (more info here ) It seems that the script is too eager to reinitialise all disks during the setup. So I ended with a blank GPT partition on an hybrid USB drive/virtual DVD device. 😬 All details can be found on my blog: https://integriservices.blogspot.com/2023/12/hey-immutable-script-do-you-just-ruined.html Maybe something that can be optimized with the release of an updated version. Thanks for all your feedback on this !

Userlevel 7

+20

Chris.Childerhose
Veeam Legend, Veeam Vanguard
6279 comments
4 months ago
2 December 2023

Never had this myself in all my testing of the ISO file. Hopefully they address this use case

Userlevel 7

+17

coolsport00
Veeam Legend
2728 comments
4 months ago
2 December 2023

Worked pretty well when I implemented it; but good to know there is an issue. I’ll be installing it all manually in my environment though. Thanks for sharing!

Userlevel 7

+17

JMeixner
Veeam Vanguard
2576 comments
4 months ago
2 December 2023

I haven’t seen this problem either.

But to be honest, I had no USB devices attached to my test server...

Userlevel 6

+3

NZ_BenThomas
Veeam Vanguard
72 comments
4 months ago
3 December 2023

Good find :) I don’t imagine many people have had additional drives with data they want to keep attached while running through the process.

H

Userlevel 5

+2

HannesK
Comes here often
160 comments
4 months ago
4 December 2023

Hello,
interesting device and interesting error you ran into.

The ISO formats everything it can see. Maybe we can add something that excludes USB drives. I will add it to the bugs list.

Thanks for reporting! 👍

Best regards,
Hannes

Userlevel 7

+6

dloseke
Veeam Legend
1176 comments
4 months ago
4 December 2023

They’re very cool devices. I looked at getting one or something like it a while back. The one I looked at was just the case and software, you supply your own drive and I having a couple of old SSD’s laying around thought I could easily use a 250GB or 500GB SSD would have a fair amount of space for ISO’s, etc. However, I came across Ventoy so that I could multiboot ISO’s from an on-screen menu and it’s been pretty easy to setup, and was free. Seems like a pretty good solution and has worked well for me for a year or two now. However, I still like the drive idea because of the difference in capacity. Strange about the Hardened Repo ISO, but good to know as I wouldn’t want to have my USB thumb drive reformatted when installing the ISO on a server here in the near future.

Userlevel 6

+8

kristofpoppe
Author
Veeam Vanguard
72 comments
4 months ago
4 December 2023

They’re very cool devices. I looked at getting one or something like it a while back. The one I looked at was just the case and software, you supply your own drive and I having a couple of old SSD’s laying around thought I could easily use a 250GB or 500GB SSD would have a fair amount of space for ISO’s, etc. However, I came across Ventoy so that I could multiboot ISO’s from an on-screen menu and it’s been pretty easy to setup, and was free. Seems like a pretty good solution and has worked well for me for a year or two now. However, I still like the drive idea because of the difference in capacity. Strange about the Hardened Repo ISO, but good to know as I wouldn’t want to have my USB thumb drive reformatted when installing the ISO on a server here in the near future.

I personal like the screen and hardware buttons to select the ISO. Really low level and almost any device I’ve tested with, picks it up as an external drive and boots from it.

Userlevel 7

+6

dloseke
Veeam Legend
1176 comments
4 months ago
4 December 2023

They’re very cool devices. I looked at getting one or something like it a while back. The one I looked at was just the case and software, you supply your own drive and I having a couple of old SSD’s laying around thought I could easily use a 250GB or 500GB SSD would have a fair amount of space for ISO’s, etc. However, I came across Ventoy so that I could multiboot ISO’s from an on-screen menu and it’s been pretty easy to setup, and was free. Seems like a pretty good solution and has worked well for me for a year or two now. However, I still like the drive idea because of the difference in capacity. Strange about the Hardened Repo ISO, but good to know as I wouldn’t want to have my USB thumb drive reformatted when installing the ISO on a server here in the near future.

I personal like the screen and hardware buttons to select the ISO. Really low level and almost any device I’ve tested with, picks it up as an external drive and boots from it.

Yes, that’s what originally drew me to this sort of device. That said, I’m a bit cheap, and maybe someday I’ll still do something like this, but Ventoy is a pretty good poor man’s version for now. Probably the biggest argument for me though is that you can still get a lot more capacity out of a drive like this than on a thumb drive, but I do also like that the thumb drive fits on my keychain and in my pocket. But I absolutely struggle with capacity on the thumb drive, so glad to see that these devices still exist. I suppose the best solution is to do both….thumb drive for stuff I want to carry with me, but the IODD devices for the big stuff that I don’t need in my pocket every day.

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