Re: Duplicating installs across the network
On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 11:07:43PM +0200, Roberto Sanchez wrote:
> but I have no experience with any of them. Can anyone out there provide some
> pointers and insight? What do you all use? Does it work well? I really hope
> that there is an easy way to this, as I do not want to have to reinstall 9
> mahines from scratch.
I found the following idea useful:
http://people.debian.org/~cmiller/debian-tips/
specifically:
saving and restoring package states
One can save the list of packages and their installed-states (whether
installed or not) into a file and back it up. Later, one could install a
starkly bare system, copy the file back and ask the package system to
install and remove packages, so that the machine will end up with the same
packages installed. You might consider this a "poor man's backup," but
beware that input you gave or personal files (like host-name or the
contents of your home directory) are not restored this way. This only
arranges the system to have the same packages as you did before.
Use dpkg --get-selections > selectionlist to save the list of installed
packages. The resulting file, selectionlist should be small enough to fit
on a floppy. To mimic the current machine, to do a "poor man's restore,"
copy the file to another (preferable freshly-installed) Debian machine,
and run dpkg --set-selections < selectionlist to tell the machine what you
want, and then apt-get dselect-upgrade to actually take action, adding and
removing.
--
Emma Jane Hogbin
[[ 416 417 2868 ][ www.xtrinsic.com ]]
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