chromakode / imaging-a-linode

Downloading an image of a Linode drive

Recently, before rebuilding samurai, I wanted to download the old drive image as a final resort in case I’d forgotten to snag any files. I was a bit disappointed that there was no way to simply download the raw image using the web interface, but there are dark arts of dd that can fill this gap. Linode provides their own instructions for the procedure, but I discovered a few tricks worth saving:

  1. Running a separate rescue distro per Linode’s suggestion and then opening it up to root ssh seemed a bit ugly to me. However, imaging the system live and in-place could lead to corrupt images if the disk is written to. Remounting the live root filesystem read-only with mount was not possible, but there is an old Linux SysRq trick you can use to remount all mounted filesystems read-only:

    $ echo u > /proc/sysrq-trigger

    While it’s still a good idea to stop any nonessential services, this allowed me to proceed with the system online and using my existing ssh keys. I also lived dangerously and kept my soon-to-be-doomed nginx process running during the imaging. >:)

  2. Since most of my drive was empty zeroes, passing the data through gzip was a massive savings in both transfer and disk usage at the destination:

    $ ssh samurai "dd if=/dev/xvda bs=64k | gzip -c" | dd of=./samurai.img.gz

  3. Un-gzipping the image file the straightforward way leads to a problem: gunzip does not appear to support sparse files. In my case, I didn’t have 50GB to spare for 1.5GB of uncompressed image data, so I needed a way to decompress to a sparse file. There’s a nice trick using cp and /proc’s file descriptor mapping to pull this off:

    $ gunzip -ck ./samurai.img.gz | cp --sparse=always /proc/self/fd/0 samurai.img

So there you have it! Gzipped online disk imaging with a sparse output file. Note that the image itself won’t be bootable, as Linodes boot a kernel specified outside of their drive storage. You can read the data by mounting the image loopback via the instructions Linode provides.

I’m sure this is all common knowledge around sysadmin circles, but I wasn’t able to find all of the pieces in one place during my googling. Hopefully this recipe may prove useful. :)