Introduction

Ever got locked out of your Webdock server after you accidentally denied access to SSH? Or you have boot issues and unable to debug? That’s where our rescue console comes to your rescue 🙂

Rescue console is a new feature we rolled out.

Using Rescue Console

Using Rescue Console is pretty straightforward. You need to click on the wrench icon and once you are at the prompt you can start using it.

If you are using this feature for the first time, please read the information shown on the dialog screen when you hit the wrench icon.

Open the console and you’ll see a screen like this where you may need to log in as a shell user for debugging.

However, in some cases the machine might not boot at all. You may have to mount the partitions and make changes in order to kick the tires. This is where our RescueSystem OS comes to your resuce.

Using Rescue System

Note: This is a dangerous territory. Please ensure you take a snapshot before proceeding.

In order to activate the Rescue System, open the Rescue Console screen, and hit the “Reboot into rescue system” button. Please read the information shown in the popup dialog.

Once the boot starts, you will see a menu where “Serial Console” option is picked by default. If you want to pick some other option, you have 3 seconds to do so (timeout).

Hang on for a few seconds, while the rescue system boot up. This is how it looks.

Cool, right?

The rescue system has internet access as well (yay!). From here you can do your debugging/fixes to boot-related issues. Common tools like scp, rsync, are also installed. So in the event of total broken system, you can fetch the data by mounting the partitions, and scp/rsync to another server you have (another Webdock server of yours, for example).

As mentioned in the popup at the beginning, executing “reboot” in the rescue environment reboots the rescue OS. If you are done with the debugging and want to reboot into regular OS you need to hit the server restart button in the Webdock dashboard. This will the detach the rescue ISO from your server so that it can boot into regular OS.

In case, for some reason, network is broken in the Rescue environment please contact Webdock Support. We will have a look.

The Rescue Console Is Secure

Is rescue console safe to use? In short, YES.

Accessing the Rescue Console is only possible if you have a valid logged-in session at Webdock. The session is rechecked every 10 seconds and closed if it is invalid or expired. You should always enable 2FA authentication on your Webdock Account to make sure your account login is secure.

Once authenticated, the Rescue Console system proxies a connection to the Webdock host machine your instance is running on through a secure internal VLAN and communication is kept encrypted. Next, the proxied connection uses the native hypervisor (Incus/KVM) serial console functionality to establish a connection directly to your machine.Once the connection is established you then need to log in with an existing shell user on your server.

Conclusion

That’s it. Rescue console is a simple and nice feature that helps you mainly when you get locked out or when you can’t work/reach your server for some technical reasons.