Teleidoscope

Mon, Nov 24, 2008

Restoring

Posted at 11:30 am MST to Technology

Man! The initial sync of a big RAID array takes FOR EV ER. But It finally finished and before I went to bed early this morning I had the OS fully updated and the /data and /home partitions restored from the external drive.

My backup routine includes dumping the full list of installed packages to a file (rpms or dpkgs, depending on the flavor of Linux) so I was able to determine which packages I needed to add to the installation to get closer to my original configuration. This doesn't include major applications like clearcase and vmware that were installed using other mechanisms, but it helps me remember packages like apcupsd (which lets the server communicate with the UPS).

I don't want to trample my clean install with the aftermath of a fairly rocky upgrade, so I won't be doing a full direct restore of root and etc. But I have all the old config files saved, so I can recover specific configuration information.

It's nice to be working from a full backup, which I don't usually bother with. When I just do a /home and /data backup (the more usual case) I copy /etc to /home/etc_sav before doing the main backup, so I don't lose all the settings.

On the laptop, I have the vmware virtual machines under /home/vmware, and /var/www is softlinked from /home/www, so everything that can be backed up usefully is in or copied to the one partition. While I'm restoring the server, I'm going to relocate a few things to /home and /data to consolidate things that need to be backed up (like the vmware virtual machines) away from things I don't want stepped on during a restore (like the logs and other debugging info in /var).

Stuff to do today:

restore the configs for the following:
   apcupsd
   dnsmasq (including /etc/hosts)
   networking (fixed IPs instead of the DHCP from the install)
   mysql?
   vnc
   GUI login screens (I prefer KDM, and like to have root able to log in directly)
restore data from backup
   www
   vmware
   clearcase
   mysql?
reinstall and reconfigure
   clearcase
   vmware

I'm really glad that the external drive has a firewire connection, not just the slower USB.

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