flexible restore/install system

[Benedict Verheyen <benedict.verheyen@sjki.be>]

Hi,

at home I run a server with actually to many stuff on it to be safe. But 
i want to test a lot of things that it evolved to this situation. It has 
ldap, samba, courier, spamassassin, clamav, squirrel, exim4,...
Anyway, for normal quick restores, restoring a backup is quick and painless.

But i was thinking of a way to not only "restore" the system but also 
"move" it. For instance, my system acts weird sometimes because of my 
tampering with it so i would love to start from a clean sarge install 
but with all my data and services running on it without spending to much 
time on the reinstall.

To manage things better i've begun moving services to uml instances on 
the server and it keeps thing organised.
Now this also makes restoring the services easy as one would only have 
to install a base system, install needed utils (uml,bridge) and copy the 
uml files containing the systems and start those.

As for other files like /etc/profile, /etc/inputrc, /etc/environment, i 
guess you could make a package containing those files and installing 
them when you install the "customizing" package or whatever you would 
call such a package.

A server reinstall or recovery would look like this:
* install debian
* install "mybase" package
  which would be a fake pacakge depending on real apps that you want to
* install like aptitude less vim
* install "base config files" package
  package containing config files, ...
    /etc/profile
    /etc/inputrc
    /etc/skel
    /etc/environment
    /etc/bash.bashrc
    ...

This would leave you with a server "customized" to your liking and with
the base apps you can't do without. Then further customizing would be
required to run the services:

* install "uml base" package
  installs uml-utilities bridge-utils + config files + root file system
    /etc/init.d/uml-bridge
    /etc/init.d/uml-start
    /usr/local/uml/rootfs_template
    /usr/local/uml/rootfs

Next would be restoring the data
* restore /root /home

As for backups, you would need to backup /root /home and the uml systems 
+ maintain changes you make to files used in the custom packages.

As said, this is not the fastest restore method but with regards to
reinstalling a server it might be pretty quick and versatile.

1. Is this doable? Any things i'm overlooking/comments/...
2. What would be an easy way to making such custom packages be it for
installing config files or fake packages used to install your favourite 
apps?

Regards,
Benedict

--
Benedict Verheyen                   Debian User
http://www.heimdallitservices.be    Public Key 0x712CBB8D