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List:       novalug
Subject:    [ma-linux] sockets in bare-metal recovery
From:       Paul Tremblay <phthenry () earthlink ! net>
Date:       2003-09-06 20:03:42
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I wrote a script to backup my complete hard drive with pax.

I put a spare hard drive in my box to test out the script, and tried a
bare-metal recovery, as outlined in *Unix Backup and Recovery*
(Preston). After correcting some obvious mistakes (not having the /dev
directory, not having any /mnt directory, etc), I was able to boot from
the spare hard drive.

However, the "recovered" hard drive was far from a copy of my original.
I got all sorts of errors. 

1. atd failed to initialize at boot time.

2. When I tried to start a windows environment, I was told that
.Xauthority could not be initialized. 


3. When I rebooted, several processes failed: the font server and
postfix (as well as a few others). These loaded sucessfully at boot
time.

I was going to give up on bare-metal recovery, but I can't see a better
solution to being able to know I can restore my hard drive exactly as it
was before a crash. 

I did some research, and discovered that sockets are saved as files when
using cpio (or using cpio with pax) during a backup. I'm not sure what a
socket is, but I believe that I should simply not back them up at all.
If they are not present, linux should create them? 

Does it sound like the socket issue is causing my problem? Is there
anything else that might be causing it? When I restored, I used the -pe
flag, which means preserve everything, so I believe I had correct
permissions for all my files.

In case you don't know what a bare-metal recovery is (as I didn't), it
means booting from an emergency disk, and dumping all files to the new
hard drive, running lilo, and then re-booting. Of course, before dumping
the files, I had to reformat the hard drive with fdisk.

Thanks

Paul

-- 

************************
*Paul Tremblay         *
*phthenry@earthlink.net*
************************
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