On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 21:00, Mark Knecht wrote:
> I built a Gentoo machine for my dad who is located about 350 miles
> away. He's been using it for 2 weeks now and is loving it. Cool to see a
> 75 year old guy using Mozilla and Evolution.
Very cool indeed. I'm impressed.
> I have two drives at his site, one internal and one external. I've
> set things up for me to do manual backups of the system to the second
> drive. (/etc and /home only for now. - comments on other things I should
> be backing up?) Anyway, I now want to figure out how I could rebuild the
> machine from here should it ever fail.
I've set PKGDIR=/home/backup/packages and FEATURES="buildpkg ..." in
make.conf. If something goes awry I can blow away my / partition and be
up and running in no time using the packages saved to my separate /home
drive. I've got about 500 packages installed and my packages directory
is just under 3GB - If you've got the space it's definitely worth it. If
you have a few things in your portage overlay you should back those up
too. Kernel .config files are handy to keep as well, although fairly
easily replaced.
> I have no experience in this sort of thing, so the first idea I had
> was to use the Live CD if it has sshd enabled and running. If he put it
> in and rebooted, would the Live CD allow anyone to log in remotely?
Yes, this is totally possible - just have your dad pop in the live cd,
type 'passwd' and set the root password, then have him start sshd - the
entire install is easily done over ssh.
> Will this work? Any other ideas about how I could get ready for when
> (not if) this eventually happens?
One thing to look into will be Catalyst when it is capable of producing
liveCDs. You could create a liveCD for your dad with all of his
evolution and mozilla settings set up, with passwords set, sshd enabled
and his internet connection set up. If anything goes wrong you can have
him boot the liveCD and use his computer like usual as you rebuild his
system behind the scenes over ssh. When you're done have him reboot and
he's back up and running on his 'real' Gentoo system.
--
Thanks,
Thomas Achtemichuk
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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