A friend recently gave me a server. He said he doesn't have much use of it because it was a linux server. All he gave me was the IP, the root pwd and the fact that it should have 40GB of free space.

Now...I gladly took it, thinking that I could make a nice webserver out of it.


But.....fist time I logged in I was already pretty surprise. Everything that had been mounted was.

rescue:~# more /etc/fstab
/dev/ram0 / ext2 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 0
/proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

/dev/rm0 was filled up to 96% of about 780MB. After some time I figured that there was another harddisk that could be mounted (dev/hda). It had 3 partitions and one of em was a SWAP partition. (why wasn't that thing mounted?).

Well....I didn't care much untill then but I changed my mind when I first rebooted the machine after lots of configuration work: All my chances had been gone!!!!

everything was set back like it was at the beginning. Nothing mounted although I edited fstab. All users gone that I had created. Everything gone!!

Now I wonder how I can get it to keep my configs. I never had that kind of server and I couldn't find anything on the web to help me.

It's a debian distro

rescue:~# uname -a
Linux rescue 2.4.21-xfs-lufs-030704 #4 SMP Fri Jul 4 20:33:15 CEST 2003 i686 unknown
rescue:~#


I hope u guys can help me with this.....the server is too nice to not be used.


thanks in advance