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

On 2006-07-03, Toby Newman <google@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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:

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.

Had a look at that - looks like a glorified dd. If you're going to be
imaging systems you're much better off with partimage, as it actually
understands filesystems, and thus doesn't back up the entire partition
(only the actual data). Only downside is that the NTFS support is flaky.


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

md5sum is your friend to make sure the data is the same on both sides...


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.

Which is precisely why you'd want to use partimage :)

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.

In the future you may want to look into using LVM on your linux
machines, as it will allow you to jiggle drive space around as required
between drives and partitions, and these days ext3 copes quite happily
with being resized on the fly. That way you don't need to mess around
with symlinks to get more space.


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.

Try getting it right with smbclient first - sort of an ftp client for
smb shares. Once you know what settings you need it will be much easier
configuring smbfs.


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... :)

And a great way of learning more about the systems you are using...

Cheers
Dave
.

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