TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

Linux distributions meant to be used as systems administrator utilities often have a special place in the heart of those who have been saved by their usefulness. In my line of work I have found them useful from time to time myself. On my SystemRescueCd review, a reader named Dave recommended checking out Trinity Rescue Kit. So, I decided to give it a try.

A Rescue Distribution

Meant to be a utility to help recover your system in the event of a problem, Trinity Rescue Kit focuses mainly on those pesky Windows PCs that from time to time have problems. Of course no OS is without its problems so it is equally useful on Linux PCs.

From the Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK) website comes the author’s reasons for creating this distribution:

Back in 2001, I had this great bootable dos cd I created, packed with all great utilities for offline PC operations called “The Vault”.
Unfortunately, the Vault consisted for 90% of software you should pay for. So distributing it in a legal way was certainly no option and I ‘m not the guy that wants to spend his time in maintaining something that ’s illegal anyway.
So I brewed on the idea of creating a free bootable Linux CD containing all available free tools that can help you in any way of rescueing your Windows installation.
And eventually, this is how far it has gotten now.

Certainly this distribution has helped many people based on the testimonials on the same page, and based on one of my reader’s recommendation. We in the IT business, and normal users in general, are thankful to the folks who create these utilities to help us out.

Trying it out

I downloaded Trinity Rescue Kit 3.2 build 279 from the website and burned it to a CD. I booted it up and it provided 20 different boot options from the live CD including ones such as:

• with proxyserver support enabled
• running from RAM
• with bigger screenfont
• in simple VGA mode (debugging of kernel output)
• with Belgian keyboard
• Virusscan all drives (non interactive)
• with a SSH server enabled
• fileshare all drives, both secured as user and as guest with no security
• with ACPI off
• and more…

Trinity Rescue Kit boot loader

This distribution is very versatile in the amount of boot options it supports.

It booted up great on my desktop PC and under VMware Fusion Beta on my MacBook Pro. The distribution is fully console based without any X support. Being that this is meant as a rescue distribution this is understandable and, in my opinion, the desired functionality. The live CD does boot using framebuffer for higher resolution console plus console graphical display.

The booted TRK system

On boot the distribution informs you the virus definitions are more than a week old. It also detected and configured my network card for DHCP. The console mouse daemon is setup and running so I can use my mouse. I was able to mount and browse my NTFS partitions on my desktop with read access as well.

Having the mouse, as well as framebuffer enabled, is very useful as the following screen shot shows after the command trkhelp is run:

Trinity Rescue Kit documentation from running trkhelp

Links in graphical mode is launched to display the documentation site of TRK. And on the topic of documentation, TRK’s documentation is pretty good with detailed explanations about the things you can do with it and how. It gives you instructions and tips on how to use the distribution to help rescue your system. This is very good because even a new user to Linux can quickly pick up this distribution and use it to save their system.

One disappointment about this distribution is that is doesn’t include man(1), one of the most important unix commands ever. While the TRK documentation is great, not having man pages is definitely a drawback.

CPR for your computer

Trinity Rescue Kit is definitely CPR for your computer like the website’s tag line says. Among the features of this distribution are (as copied from the site):

• easily reset windows passwords
• 4 different virusscan products integrated in a single uniform commandline with online update capability
• full ntfs write support thanks to ntfs-3g (all other drivers included as well)
• clone NTFS filesystems over the network
• wide range of hardware support (kernel 2.6.19.2 and recent kudzu hwdata)
• easy script to find all local filesystems
• self update capability to include and update all virusscanners
• full proxyserver support.
• run a samba fileserver (windows like filesharing)
• run a ssh server
• recovery and undeletion of files with utilities and procedures
• recovery of lost partitions
• evacuation of dying disks
• UTF-8 international character support.
• elaborated documentation

Unfortunately the elaborated documentation doesn’t include man pages.

Final thoughts

Well, this is a rescue kit and it is made for fixing broken systems. I didn’t have any systems that needed fixing, but if I did I am confident that TRK would be able to help me out a lot. As I routinely do have use for such a utility, I will give it a proper test of its capabilities the next time I have a Windows PC that won’t boot and needs fixing.

I feel that both SystemRescueCd and Trinity Rescue Kit are both valuable sys admin tools. I can’t really say whether one or the other is better. TRK did seem to have better hardware detection, however.

I’d recommend placing TRK in your toolkit. You never know when you might need a quick loading rescue distribution. If you’ve used Trinity Rescue Kit, please share your thoughts and experiences if it was able to help you.