[Nix-dev] Persistent System State (Was: Disaster recovery / re-deployment) (fwd)

[Florian Friesdorf]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2012 16:36:40 -0500 (EST), roconnor at theorem.ca wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Jan 2012, Florian Friesdorf wrote:
> > 
> > Hi Rickard,
> > 
> > On Tue, 04 Oct 2011 11:45:14 +0200, "Rickard Nilsson" 
> > <rickard.nilsson at telia.com> wrote:
> >>> However in your case
> >>> http://mawercer.de/~marc/minimal-install-archive.patch should be enough
> >>> if you're lucky.
> >> 
> >> Thanks! I will start out from that and see where I end up.
> > 
> > did you made progress with that? For a full backup there might be more
> > files needed, e.g.:
> > /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
> > /etc/passwd
> > /etc/shadow
> > /etc/group
> > /var/lib/wicd/*
> 
> I wonder if we could start moving towards putting all system persistant state 
> into /var/lib so that is the only thing that needs to be backed up.

I like the idea of centralizing system state a lot. I'm not sure whether
/var/lib is the right place. Also depending on services running there
are spool dirs that need backup, the imap mail store, log files - mostly
all of /var I guess.

> So we would move /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group into /var/lib and 
> hardlink them into /etc when /etc is rebuild upon start up.
> 
> I don't really know enough about linux to know how feasible this would be.

-- 
Florian Friesdorf <flo at chaoflow.net>
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