On 11/25/24 22:03, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
Many thanks to all of you who have replied to my questions.
YW. :-)
It seems that I've been creating trouble for myself by trying to kludge something together from the old installation. The only reason I tried this was the age-old problem I have whenever I start from a fresh install: I lose all my customizations and added packages that went into /usr, /var, /etc, etc. :-) It takes a while to put all this stuff back; for a month or so after a fresh install I'm discovering (and re-installing) missing things. I was hoping I could avoid this, but it seems that the time I'm spending on my jury-rigged "solution" more than offsets any savings I might realize. I bit the bullet and downloaded the Debian 12.8 installer to a thumb drive. To be safe, I unplugged the original hard drive to keep it out of harm's way (and to avoid any possible confusion for the installer). Then I deleted all the partitions I was experimenting with on the SSD, and did a fresh install. WOW! Was that ever fast! A complete install in 5 minutes or less! And booting is also lightning-fast. But, as I expected, all my stuff is gone. Well, sort of. I plugged the hard drive back in, and all my files are there. But there are no icons left on the desktop - no more Portal, and none of the utilities I downloaded were on my $PATH. How do the rest of you deal with all the user-added stuff that vanishes when you do a fresh install?
Similar to other readers, I use a version control system (CVS) to help me with system administration -- checking in system configuration files I modify or create, keeping a plain text log file of my notes and console sessions, keeping a plain text file containing the names of packages I have installed, checking in various shell and Perl scripts I have written over the years, checking in app configuration and data files, etc.. Then when I do a fresh install, I check out a CVS working directory for the previous incarnation of that machine, or something similar, and use those files to help me configure the new system.
AIUI the "top shelf" solution is configuration management systems, such as Puppet, Ansible, etc.. I expect they are necessities in large organization IT environments.
Are there some tricks I can use, rather than painstakingly re-installing all my utilities one by one?
I take images of my OS disks using dd(1) on a regular basis. So, if I finger fumble and scramble an OS instance, recovery consists of pulling the OS SSD, restoring the last image onto a spare SSD, booting, updating Debian, checking out the appropriate CVS working directories, and merging changes made since the image was taken.
I assume you can just copy the old /home over to the new drive (although in my case I'll be leaving the big music and video directories on the spinning rust, to be accessed at a new mount point that I'll add to /etc/fstab). But that does nothing about all the nifty utilities that were in (e.g.) /usr/bin (even though the configuration files are probably in /home).
I treat the home tree as part of the OS instance. So, it is incorporated into my image backup/ restore process (above). My home directory contains CVS working directories and whatever files and/or directories Debian and the various apps put there.
It is up to us and/or the various app developers to figure out migration, disaster preparedness, disaster recovery, etc., for the various apps we use. I have configured Thunderbird to copy incoming mail to a spare directory on the IMAP server, I have configured Thunderbird to send a BCC of outgoing mail to a spare e-mail account, and I backup the Thunderbird profile directory daily. I use the Firefox "Sync" feature to deal with that app's configuration and data. I have put various app files into CVS projects.
For now, though, the box is sort of running. And man, is it a speed demon. Once again, thanks for the assistance.
Enjoy. :-) David
