Recovery [Windowze never!!]

Michael A. Peters mpeters at mac.com
Sun Mar 21 19:45:03 UTC 2004


On Sun, 2004-03-21 at 18:52 +0200, Chadley Wilson wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-03-21 at 08:37, Pinco wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I'm a beginner and I would like to learn how to do what you did!
> > 
> > So, can you please explain me how to update from FC1 to FC2 mantaining all my configuration (gnome, applications etc) and users? How did you do?
> > 
> > Thanks a lot,
> > Nino
> > 
> Well Nino,
> 
> Quite simple.
> 
> When you first setup your linux box. be sure to create a /home
> partition.
> The rest is how tidy you are when you work.
> 
> Try not to do any work outside of your home folder. eg </home/nino>
> If you make or edit any config files like ld.so.conf or your fstab you
> can create a hidden folder in your home dir and leave copies of those
> file there for reference. <mkdir .dirname>
> Also try and keep an updated list of the programs you have manually
> installed. your prefered stuff.
> Keep the rpms for these apps in a hidden folder in your home dir so that
> you can quickly get back up to speed.
> 
> You are now quite prepared [Hopefully], Hold thumbs next time your box
> mysteriously dies.
> If you have really really broken it, and need to reload.
> Do a clean install and when you partition DO NOT FORMAT </home>
> partition and DO NOT CHANGE ITS NAME.

As far as locally installed software - if it is compiled from source,
keep the src tarball in /usr/local/src

Some like to keep /usr/local as a separate partition - I prefer not to,
because sometimes the software that I have in there is dynamically
linked to a library in /usr/lib that changes when a new version of the
OS is installed. So for me - /usr/local/src is all I need to keep
between installations.

with respect to custom rpm's - make a cronjob that weekly logs what
rpm's you have on your system -

rpm -qa > /home/username/rpms-installed.txt

After doing a clean install - you can then compare what is installed on
your system with what use to be installed on your system - and use yum
to install stuff that you use to have but no longer do.

As far as rpm's you yourself built - I do that in my home directory
anyway (and archive both spec files and src files to a cvs server on my
lan) as rpm's should never be built as the root user.

Create an rpm tree in your home directory and a .rpmmacros file to tell
rpm where that tree is (if you are into building custom rpm's)

And don't forget to copy your openssl keys to somewhere safe - if you
have to reinstall your / - you'll want to use the same keys so that you
won't get annoying "ack! There's a man in the middle!!!!" warnings from
ssh/scp





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