Preserving systems (was: recovering FC3 from a bad superblock)

Tom Buskey tbuskey at gmail.com
Tue May 24 09:41:01 EDT 2005


On 5/24/05, Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at iname.com> wrote:
> On May 18 at 11:59pm, Greg Rundlett wrote:
> > It is truly amazing how much time and effort goes into installing and
> > customizing/personalizing a system.
> 
>    Indeed.
> 
> > Back at Virtual Access Networks, we created a product that managed and
> > migrated computer 'personalities' for Windows.  ... I wish something like
> > that existed for Linux.
> 
>    A lot of that is "already done".
> 
>    I've been carrying the same $HOME/ directory around with me through several
> major system upgrades, a handful of hard disks, and more distributions then I
> can count.  All those dot files keep working.  The best software is
> backwards-and-forwards compatible, so that I don't have to care what version
> I'm running.  More software is merely good, and will migrate older files to
> newer formats.  For things that don't upgrade well, I can just "mv ~/.foo
> ~/.foo.old" and start from scratch.

I've been modifying my .profile/.kshrc/.aliases files since '95 or so
w/ various starts since '92.  They work on bash, ksh and PDksh (linux
ksh :-( ).  They adapt to linux, sunos, solaris, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
Ultrix, MacOSX, HP-UX, IRIX and cygwin.  They also detect if I su and
change my prompt.  Same startup scripts, same $HOME (if I NFS it).

I think windows is capable of some of this with roaming profiles and
the like but it's not common practice.  Throwing laptops into the mix
makes things harder too.

Having networked home (my documents) and configurations typically
doesn't happen for small environments like a lab, home LANs and
anything less then 10-40 systems.  People can justify running around
to each machine and futzing.  To get beyond that, you really have to
standardize & script.  Once you do that, 100, 200, it doesn't matter
as much.  I'm sure that's what google does.

I dream of being able to swap a machine under a windows user w/o them
transfering data or redoing configuration.  I went through a few
upgrades (solaris 2.5.1 sparc 5 -> ultra 1 solaris 7 -> ultra 10
solaris 7) by having the user logoff, shutdown, lift the monitor, swap
out the system, boot and on their way.  It was literally only a 10
minute downtime for the user.



>    You can do the same with /etc/, although that tends to make things messy as
> the distribution changes major subsystems around.  But there's always
> Slackware if you don't like that.  ;-)

I have a cronjob on my home systems that tars up /etc every night. 
When I reinstall, I do a tedious compare and merge weeding.




-- 
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but
have only one course of action.
- Frank Herbert



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