7. Distribution Specific Notes

7.1. Fedora

Fedora is the sequel to Red Hat 9. Make the following changes:

• Fedora uses grub, not lilo. Make those changes.

• We no longer need to save kerberos libraries separately, as in Red Hat 8.0. Remove or comment out that line of save.metadata:

  # RH8. Fedora 1 puts them in /lib # crunch kerberos usr/kerberos/lib/

• The names of the libraries we need to save for SSH's benefit have changed. Also in save.metadata:

  # save these so we can use ssh for restore. *crack* for RH 7.0 login # authentication. # RH 8.0 # crunch usr.lib usr/lib/*crack* usr/lib/libz* usr/lib/libssl* usr/lib/libcrypto* # Fedora 1 crunch usr.lib usr/lib/*crack* usr/lib/libz* usr/lib/libwrap* usr/lib/libk* usr/lib/libgss*

• In restore.metadata, we have more directories to rebuild.

  # If you boot via an initrd, make sure you build a directory here so # the kernel can mount the initrd at boot. tmp/.font-unix is for the # xfs font server. for dir in mnt/save mnt/zip mnt/cdrom mnt/floppy mnt/imports mnt/dosc mnt/nfs\ proc initrd tmp/.font-unix var/empty/sshd var/lock/subsys var/log; do

  And some modes to set:

  chmod a-w $target/proc # Restore /proc's read-only permissions # Set modes chmod 0111 $target/var/empty/sshd chmod 0775 $target/var/lock # For Fedora. First two for xfs. chroot $target chown xfs:xfs /tmp/.font-unix chmod 1777 $target/tmp/.font-unix # set the sticky bit. chmod 1777 $target/tmp

7.2. Red Hat 9

I haven't worked with Red Hat 9. Comments on Fedora may also apply to Red Hat 9.

7.3. Red Hat 8.0

Red Hat 8.0 requires changes only if you log in via ssh to your computer after the first stage restore. If, say, you perform the second state restore over ssh. If so, make the following changes:

• In the file save.metadata, add the kerberos libraries to the first stage backup.

  crunch kerberos usr/kerberos/lib/

• In the file restore.metadata, there is a loop that builds several directories. First, add these two directory names to the list: /var/empty/sshd and /var/lock/subsys. As Red Hat 8.0 defaults to ext3fs, it requires an initial RAM disk at boot time. So make sure initrd is in the list. Then, if it isn't already there, add the -p switch to the mkdir command.

  The directory /var/lock/subsys is owned by group lock, so change its owner.

  chroot $target /bin/chown root:lock /var/lock

  Finally, usr/lib/libcrypto* has gone away, so you can remove that from the line that crunches usr/lib.

7.4. Red Hat 7.1

This distribution is the one I used originally on my test computer. I have had no problems with it.

7.5. Red Hat 7.0

This version seems to require libcrack (in /usr/lib) and its attendant files in order to authenticate users. So in save.metadata, add to the line that saves /usr/lib the following: /usr/lib/*crack* and enable that line.

7.6. Knoppix

I have not used Knoppix, but other folks have. Pasi Oja-Nisula reports:

For me the best thing about using Knoppix is that I don't need a specific boot medium for each machine, but I can use the same tools all the time. And hardware support in Knoppix is really great. I don't have that much experience with different platforms, but all the machines I've tried have worked fine, scsi drivers are found and so on.

I'm doing this recovery thing by copying the backups over the network to other machine. The restore involves booting the Knoppix cd, fetching the metadata.tar.gz from the network machine. Then make.dev, mount.dev, fetching the other tar.gz files, grub and reboot. Some typing involved but thanks to your scripts it's quite straighforward. Unless changing from ide to scsi or something, but even then it's not that difficult, since Linux is easy to restore to different hardware.

Also see "System recovery with Knoppix".