Good afternoon,
I had intended on starting my conversion from Suse 9.1 to Gentoo over the weekend, but the weather turned out to be way to nice to remain indoors.
But in my planning stages I realized I have a bit of a longer learning curve than I initially anticipated. So, I'm going to remedy this by starting off with:
Question #1
What do the professional (and amateur) admins among you consider to be essential system documentation in the event of a disaster. I am fairly well versed on the requirements of a M$ based system and network, but have only been dabbling in Linux for a couple years. Backups I know, but what is considered a fairly necessary _paper_ trail in the event that the unexpected happens, and a total rebuild is necessary in the shortest time possible.
Much of it depends on the size of your network and what you're doing. I run mostly clusters of the same box. So I don't back up the OS because I can lose one without causing trouble and can easily add a new server in the case of a prolonged outage. I do tar.gz the data and relevant config files. You'll want to make a judgment call on how much infrastructure you think you need to dedicate to backups.
However in the event that I need to add a new server I do have a few build docs and scripts. It's really the little stuff that is a pain in the ass. I keep track of it in a Wiki, which seems less annoying than they were a few years ago, but whatever works for you. Mine has stuff like this:
New Server build
/etc/resolv.conf
Use the linked file. Never change the domain search order or old broken stuff that the wed devs idiots won't grep out will break. The rotate stuff distributes the lookups so we don't overload ns1. The timeouts cause lookups to timeout faster and move on the next server in case we lose a name server.
/etc/rc.conf
Change default editor to vimName Servers only
Add symlinks to deal with Gentoo bind/named nonsense
ln -sf /etc/bind/named.conf /etc/named.conf
Make the Redhat admins happyln -sf /var/bind /var/named
And then ask, "why does Gentoo use named in /var/run/ instead bind?"and so on.
I would however seriously look at the Catalyst tool for building stage3 or what people are calling stage4 builds. I haven't gotten it working exactly right, but the idea would be to include most of the little nonsense in a stage3 and then use that as my base to generate stage4 build of particular kinds of server. So I'd be able to lay down a new name server, web server, mail server, db server etc in under an hour. Then import or rsync any data over and you're set.
A few people I know are using Feather Linux to try to ghost partitions and then lay them down on new machines. Haven't heard how well that's working, but there was no reason why it would be an issue.
The roundabout point on this is a Linux environment can get away from you if you let it. Use the same USE variables on everything and document the reason why you use those. And don't forget to update the docs and machines if that ever changes or you'll be fighting for three hours on a Sunday when something isn't quite kosher.
kashani -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
