Recently I managed to hose a box in a perfectly self-inflicted storm of idiocy. Imagine a SmartOS server with the following issues:

• Root password not noted down anywhere
• /usbkey/config edited badly, meaning the network settings are wrong
• Rebooting the server to apply some other settings

Needless to say, this caused a tiny issue in the server doing what it’s supposed to. Luckily I had access to a KVM remote console for the box and the following worked.

I brought the machine up, choosing the second option for recovery at the grub menu. Waited for a login prompt, then logged in with root/root.

Realised quite quickly that /usbkey must be persisted on the zones zfs pool otherwise the configuration would be lost after shutdown, so imported the correct pool, created a directory to mount into and then mounted the zfs share.

zpool import zones
mkdir /usbkey
mount -F zfs zones/usbkey /usbkey