Re: rebuilding a system remotely?

[Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net>]

Ron Johnson wrote:
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> Miles Fidelman wrote:
>   
> > Hi Folks,
> >
> > I have two machines sitting in a data center.  One of them, I've just
> > finished, very carefully, configuring for production use.
> >
> > The other machine I've used a bit as a sandbox for trying things before
> > doing them on the production machine - and at this point the sandbox is
> > pretty well messed up.
> >
> > I'd like to either
> > a. rebuild from scratch to Sarge
> > b. upgrade to a clean testing release.
> > either way, without a trip to the datacenter to rebuild from a CD.
> >     
>
> How "messed up"?  IOW, what if you just started paring away
> packages, aggressively making it as *minimal* as possible while
> still being able to run ssh.  (From experience, I can tell you that
> that's pretty darned small.)
>
> Then, start adding back packages as you see fit.
>   
Well... messed up as in the mail system is completely gronked.

Tried removing and purging every vestige of exim, postfix, sendmail, 
then reinstalled postfix.  Can't get postfix to start.  Tried purging 
postfix and getting exim to run - no dice.  I think, somewhere along the 
way, I messed up a dependency.

Sigh....