On Sun, 9 May 2004, Smitty wrote:
> On Sunday 09 May 2004 23:31, Eben King wrote:
> > OK, I hosed my system tonight, but got it back. I have two identical hard
> > drives, and every night I copy one to the other with a cron job. I tried
> > to compile a module tonight (reiserfs.o), and wound up with a system that
> > stopped its boot early, complaining about an unrecognized symbol in some
> > module (I forget which one). I recovered it by copying the entire
> > /lib/modules/2.4.22 hierarchy from the backup to the original. Yay, the
> > backup proved its worth. Now, if I hadn't rebooted (and uncovered the
> > error) and the backup was remade with the faulty module, I'd have been
> > screwed.
> >
> > What is the "correct" (i.e., nondestructive) way of recovering from such a
> > situation? Reinstalling the distribution would be destructive, as there
> > are copious files I've changed.
>
> You are essentially doing it. You use one hard drive for fiddling and the
> other contains the stable binaries.
Well yeah, that works for mistakes that I discover within one day
(technically, that I discover before 5am). However, if I hadn't rebooted
before the backup ran, I wouldn't have discovered the error, and the bad
modules would've been backed up. What then, boot from an OS CD, chroot
into my system, "rpm -i" a stock kernel and modules, and then upgrade from
there?
That's a good reason to keep at all times a previous kernel + modules.
-- I firmly believed we should not march into Baghdad ...To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant, into a latter-day Arab hero assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator [.] - George Bush Sr.
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