You may want to use SystemRescueCd to work on a remote machine. For instance you may want to use it for disaster recovery after a server crashed in a datacenter. In that case you want to ssh to the SystemRescueCd, but you can’t because you must first set the root password and configure the ip address.

To solve that problem, I introduced three options that allow you to set automatically the root password and the network settings:

• option rootpass=xxx sets the root password of the live system to xxx
• option ethx=ipaddr sets the a static IP address of all the ethernet interfaces found on the system
• option gateway=ipaddr sets the default route

For instance, if you can boot with the following boot image and options:
rescuecd setkmap=uk rootpass=1234 ethx=192.168.0.1

That way the system will boot and you can use the SystemRescueCd live system by doing an ssh to 192.168.0.1 and by giving 1234 as the password.

The ethx boot options sets the IP address on all the interfaces because computers often have several network adapters, and there is no way to know which one will be seen as the first ethernet device (eth0), and that way you are sure that the one you want will be configured.

Of course the rootpass=xxx option does not change the password of the linux systems that could be installed on your hard drive (Fedora, Ubuntu, …)

So it means you can make a customized SystemRescueCd disc with changes only in the boot options file (isolinux.cfg) if you want your password/ethernet settings to be automatically used at boot time. It’s espcially easy to use with the network booting via PXE since you just have to edit pxelinux.cfg during your pxe server setup.

Here are other examples of what you can do:

• rescue64 setkmap=uk rootpass=abcd ethx=10.102.100.1/24 gateway=10.102.100.254
• vmlinuz2 ethx=192.168.2.10 gateway=192.168.2.1