Specifications

After reading through the DSL Web
site, I discovered that it was possible to
run DSL off of a bootable USB key, and
that old love for the Bootable Business
Card was rekindled in a new way. It
wasn’t until I had a conversation with
fellow sysadmin Kyle Rankin about the
PXE boot environment he’d implement-
ed, that I realized it might be possible to
set up a USB key to do more than merely
boot a recovery environment. Before
long, I had added the CentOS and
Ubuntu netinstalls to my little USB key.
Not long after that, I was mentioning
this in my favorite IRC channel, and one
of the fellows in there suggested I put
the code on SourceForge and call it
Billix. I’d had a couple beers by then
and thought it sounded like a great
idea. In that instant, Billix was born.
Billix is an aggregation of many dif-
ferent tools that can be useful to system
administrators, all compressed down to
fit within a 256MB bootable USB thumb-
drive. The 256MB size is not an arbitrary
number; rather, it was chosen because
USB thumbdrives are very inexpensive at
that size (many companies now give
them away as advertising gimmicks). This
allows me to have many Billix keys lying
around, just waiting to be used. Because
the keys are cheap or free, I don’t feel
bad about leaving one in a server for a
day or two. If your USB drive is larger
than 256MB, you still can use it for its
designed purpose—storing files. Billix
doesn’t hamper normal use of the USB
drive in any way. There also is an ISO
distribution of Billix if you want to burn
a CD of it, but I feel it’s not nearly as
convenient as having it on a USB key.
The current Billix distribution (0.21
at the time of this writing) includes the
following tools:
I Damn Small Linux 4.2.5
I Ubuntu 8.04 LTS netinstall
I Ubuntu 7.10 netinstall
I Ubuntu 6.06 LTS netinstall
I Fedora 8 netinstall
I CentOS 5.1 netinstall
I CentOS 4.6 netinstall
I Debian Etch netinstall
I Debian Sarge netinstall
I Memtest86 memory-checking utility
I Ntpwd Windows password
changing utility
I DBAN disk wiper utility
So, with one USB key, a system
administrator can recover or repair a
machine, install one of eight different
Linux distributions, test the memory in
a system, get into a Windows machine
with a lost password or wipe the disks
of a machine before repurpose or
disposal. In order to install any of the
netinstall-based Linux distributions, a
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