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I have a VPS running inside an OpenStack cloud that has more or less crashed completely - the provider hasn't been able to get any kind of networking on it for over 2 days, seems completely broken on their end. The server itself has already been migrated elsewhere, no harm done there, but there is a single text file left on the machine that I need. Only connection I have to the server is an HTML5 Canvas based web interface.

Since it's a canvas, copy/paste isn't possible. I can't get any networking going on the machine. The file itself is a 2Kb private key, and running OCR on screenshots gets thoroughly confused between 0 and O, 1 and I, and other things because it has no context. Obviously typing over a square block of nearly 2000 characters of which every typo means the result isn't a valid key is not a really viable or attractive option. Losing the key means having to purchase a new $200 certificate.

The only thing I have left is the Console Output Log in the OpenStack GUI, which shows everything that's being logged to the console at kernel level, in plaintext. If I can dump the file to there I can copy/paste it out. Now I have tried everything I know, from logger -s to cat my.key > /dev/console, but it's not showing up there.

Anyone have an idea how to do this, or another option to retrieve the file?

Niels Keurentjes
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1 Answers1

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I managed to pull it off.

First off, this answer pointed me towards using /dev/kmsg as root to log to the kernel log. This works fine, echo test > /dev/kmsg showed up in my external logs perfectly.

However, cat my.key > /dev/kmsg gave an error, noting invalid data on the input end. I suspected this was due to the inherent newlines in this kind of file, so I adapted the script found in this answer to echo the file line by line to the kernel log. Worked fine, and I could copy it out of there.

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Niels Keurentjes
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