VPS restored from Kernel & Boot partition
About the Project
Service Sector : Fine art photography
MICKEY SHANNON Photography is running online home of open edition and luxurious limited edition fine art prints of nature and landscape photos. They are proud to offer extremely high-quality fine art landscape photography with the best images, collected by fine art collectors from around the world.
They can provide some excellent photography with aerial footage and work with you to realize your vision.
THE PROBLEM
Client is running his excellent website on our SSD Earth VPS, all the things were running very smoothly until the client made a few changes to his VPS. He had accidentally overwritten the Linux configuration files which lead to the VPS inaccessible. By the time this happened, the client contacted us immediately via a support ticket and one of our highly experienced technical team members named Kris started to intervene at the immediate effort.
OUR SOLUTION
Our effort was to fix clients' issue quickly. Here, are the steps we took to make the VPS accessible.
(1) Restored the VPS from the previous backup :
As an immediate effect, we tried to make the VPS accessible by restoring it from the previous backups. We asked for confirmation from the client and he agreed with this. We restored the VPS from backup but still, it remained inaccessible.
(2) Tried to load VPS from older kernel :
It was the time when the backup was not helpful for us, we had to correct the config level issue. Kris had changed the VPS kernel to an older one and rebooted but the issue remained the same!
(3) Modified boot selection partition :
Now, we booted the VPS in the recovery console and manually specified root=/dev/xvda1 during boot selection by pressing 'e' option after rebooting VPS and installed the latest kernel and regenerated grub using grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg command and rebooted VPS manually.
Guess what? This tactic works and VPS came up automatically.
THE RESULTS
VPS was accessible within a few hours and the client had appreciated our efforts. It was a great learning experience for our team as this kind of typical issue is always stiff to resolve.