Re: Penis-Waving Goats (Planned Weekend Gaming 30/06/06)

On 2006-07-01, ElFez <el.grande.fez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2006-06-30, Toby Newman <google@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2006-06-30, The Rev <the_rev_yes_really@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I would quite like to play Dapper Drake this weekend too. I'm wondering
if it's safe to upgrade my Breezy Badger to DD - I can't afford to buy a
new hard disk to do a parallel install and I don't want to wipe my
current install until the alternative is working okay.


Should work fine - just replace all occurances of 'breezy' with 'dapper'
in /etc/apt/sources.list (something like ':%s/breezy/dapper/g' in vi
will do nicely). Then 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get upgrade'. Job done.

And even if it should get buggered you should be OK to reinstall as long
as your /home directory is on a different partition (unless /etc is
heavily modified - but you have that backup up, don't you?).

Upgrading without having to reinstall is one of the many nice things
about debian/ubuntu...

Have to say I'm sorely tempted to put ubuntu on my company laptop
instead of Fedora, but since Dead Rat pay my wages it might not look too
good ;)

Well, that was a fun weekend.

First of all I decided to make sure I was nicely backed up in case of
some failure. I got hold of Ghost for Linux (g4l) and created a bootable
CD to ghost my linux disk across the network.

Then I had to set the XP box up on a wired network because I don't trust
wireless to transfer large files effectively.

I then had to set up a FTP server on my XP box to allow g4l to store the
ghost.

Then I had to write zeros into the empty space on my linux hard disk to
make the disk image compress more effectively and fit into the free
space on my XP hard disk.

Finally I started the ghosting and left it to ghost for an hour or so.

Once it was complete I wanted some kind of contingency plan because,
never having ghosted before, I wasn't 100% confident that the process
would work, and had no way of testing it without risking my data.

I decided to copy my /home directory (containing 2 users) into
/home/user1/Desktop/backup since this location was shared via Samba and
would allow me to copy the backup across the network manually within XP.

This is where things got interesting.

You may notice from the paths above that I copied the /home direction
*into itself*. This, coupled with the fact that I have several symlinked
directories in my home/user* directories which point to other
partitions, meant that I had some kind of recursive vortex of data
forming on my harddisk. Trying to visualise it made my head hurt in the
same way watching the portal levels in the Prey videos made my head
hurt.

This vortex thing didn't occur to me until I'd started actually moving
the backup files upstairs via Samba. Although I was moving a *copy* of
my /home directory, I think due to this recursive symlinking, I ended up
moving the actual files. Whipping the rug out from under Kubuntu's
feet, as it were. Oh bollocks.

Then came the tedious task of going through each of the copied
directories in XP and manually placing the files back in their
respective directories on Linux. There was over a thousand of the
buggers. I'm still not confident that the permissions are correct on the
replaced files.

That done, I decided to try to archive /home and store the archive
directly on XP. First of all I tried doing this via FTP since I already
had that set up. I could get my user to write to the ftp directory but,
for some reason, root could not, and I needed root to do the job because
I wanted to copy more than one user's home directory. Much
troubleshooting of FTP later and I abandoned that in favour of Samba.
I'd only ever had Samba working in one direction before (XP seeing
Linux, not the other way round) so I had to troubleshoot that to get it
running in both directions. Much firewall and IP fiddling later and I am
able to browse XP from within linux, but without write permissions.

That's the next job - enable writing to my shares on XP.

So I didn't get as far as trying Dapper. In stead, ironically, I have
potentially hosed my system by trying to back it up.

Still, omlettes, eggs, breaking... :)

--
-Toby, who...
Add the word afiduluminag to the subject
field to circumvent my email filters.
Ignore any mail delivery error.
.

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