On 21/07/10 08:41 AM, B. Alexander wrote:
3. Build the new machine with the netinst or businesscard cd. When asked what type of system to build (package selection), uncheck all the boxes. Reboot into your new system, copy pkglist.hostname from step 1 onto the machine. Do the following:
I think you are also supposed to change your sources.list file at this point (for example if your machine was using Debian Unstable but if you used a Stable or Testing installer).
dpkg --set-selections< pkglist.hostname
apt-get dselect-upgrade
This should give you a system with a nearly identical set of packages that
you can then tweak to your hearts content.
I am not sure what you think about /home, but usually that is the more important consideration for me. What I usually do is: 1. Make note of the UIDs & GIDs of the users (or the order in which they were created). 'ls -nl /home' lists those. 2. Make a backup of /var as well to restore users' mail (in /var/mail) and cronjobs (in /var/spool/cron/crontabs) and perhaps at jobs (in /var/spool/cront).
Finally, backing up /etc and restoring it later prevents you from having to do all the configurations again.
[1] You can actually back these files up and have a pool of different "types" of machine. For instance, I have a workstation packagelist, a laptop list, as well as lists for the various types of bastion hosts in my network, including a wiki host (mediawiki), firewall, backup server, etc.
All good points. Thanks. -- Please reply to this list only. I read this list on its corresponding newsgroup on gmane.org. Replies sent to my email address are just filtered to a folder in my mailbox and get periodically deleted without ever having been read.