Re: Return a Debian system to a pristine state
Thomas Schmitt wrote:
> Do we have a feature to get a list of installed packages and to later
> use it for re-installation ?
Yes. dpkg --get-selections and its reverse, dpkg --set-selections
to which one might want to add a backup of /etc and /var, at a
minimum. And presumably /home.
> I normally need weeks to get everything installed on my next machine.
> In the beginning it is easy to choose the big chunks. But the previous
> machine is then old as stone and can hardly serve for the fine tuning.
> So i need to find out what's still missing and install on demand.
When we need to deploy the same set of software and tweak the
same configs across multiple machines, we use configuration
management software. Chef, puppet, ansible, salt, bcfg2,
cfengine, vagrant.... there are lots of these systems. But for
one person and one or two machines, they're overkill.
RAID for hardware reliability. Version control and/or snapshots for
minor error correction. Backups for major issues. Households
don't usually need to go further than that.
-dsr-
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