On 5/10/2010 10:25 AM, Josh Malone wrote:
>
>> I liked your explanation... ;-)
>> I think I'll be doing *full* backuppc backup of my server as a first
>> step to have constant backups.
>>
>> My thouhgts are related to eventually recovering the situation. As the
>> server I want to back up is barely a squid proxy, I don't have to back
>> up great amounts of data as it would be in case of a backuppc pool
>> itself.
>> What my concern is about, is the fact that when I'd be reinstalling from
>> scratch on a new HDD, how would I get to the same state of installed/not
>> installed packages as it was on its latest useful backup? Is there any
>> way to somehow extract some sort of "Sysmte State" (like on Windows
>> boxes) to know which packages are installed, and which aren't?
This is up to the distribution's package manager. Fedora/RH/Centos/SuSE
use rpm, so if you've backed up the rpm database you'll have it in the
restore (and you have to be sure that you've backed up enough of the
system that the content of the installed packages match the database).
> The best way to make sure your OS installs are repeatable and
> non-deterministic is to script them.
This is a good idea, but more than doubles the amount of work you have
to do to maintain a system. For a single-purpose server or something
you re-use over a large farm it is probably a win.
> Here we use RHEL so we install
> machines via kickstart. Previously I've used wrapper scripts to
> 'sysinstall' on FreeBSD and similar for Debian's installer (with lots of
> help from its author). If you have your OS install procedure automated you
> never have to worry about bare-metal restores. Just kick off the
> re-install, then restore the unique data... you can even restore all of
> /etc to the newly-installed box and it should work (modulo any changes to
> fstab, ethernet devices, etc...)
For the above-mentioned squid probably all you really need is a copy of
the squid.conf file dropped on top of a new install, but if there are
intertwined authentication and iptables settings or helper scripts
things can get messy.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikes...@gmail.com
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