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JC Denton
Apprentice
Joined: 16 Apr 2003
Posts: 151
Location: USA
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 Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 5:52 am Post subject: Coming back to Gentoo |
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I just finished updating two fairly fresh Gentoo installs after having spent the past ~five years using Debian. It feels good to come back. Even better to have OpenRC. I must admit, I was almost swayed to Devuan. I'm not sure their security posture is up to par with either the Gentoo or Debian security teams, though. Here's hoping my trusted shorthand, "sudo emerge --sync && sudo emerge -avuDN world" is still worthwhile. (So far it seems to have been!)
I don't suppose there's a way to see what major changes have happened over the years? Perusing GLEPs? |
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charles17
Advocate
Joined: 02 Mar 2008
Posts: 3664
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| Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 6:06 am Post subject: Re: Coming back to Gentoo |
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| Captain Kirk wrote: | | I don't suppose there's a way to see what major changes have happened over the years? Perusing GLEPs? |
Some of them are listed in https://gentoo.org/support/news-items/ |
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Myu
Apprentice
Joined: 22 Oct 2014
Posts: 164
Location: Belgium
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| Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 7:47 am Post subject: |
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Welcome back !
I'm only using Gentoo since 3 years but during those, I did not see a lot of huge user-facing changes, one comes to mind though : the portage tree is available via Git nowadays.
Otherwise, it is still rock solid.
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Gentoo stable with bits of ~amd64 // Xfce 4.13 + Compiz Reloaded. |
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HungGarTiger
Apprentice
Joined: 04 Feb 2014
Posts: 180
Location: /nz/auckland
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| Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 7:47 am Post subject: |
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| Welcome back. What made you switch over to Debian in the first place? Critical or sensitive systems? Debian was the 2nd distro I tried but once I found my way here I couldn't imagine going back, even my home servers now run Gentoo. |
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JC Denton
Apprentice
Joined: 16 Apr 2003
Posts: 151
Location: USA
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| Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 4:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Myu wrote: | | the portage tree is available via Git nowadays. |
Neat! Any experience on whether this is faster than the traditional rsync?
| HungGarTiger wrote: | | What made you switch over to Debian in the first place? Critical or sensitive systems? |
I had a critical system on Gentoo that suffered a massive RAID failure. While I had backups of /home, /etc ... and other important areas, I didn't have a complete image that I could just "dd" over or something similar. I started a fresh install and hit a blocker bug whose fix would take a day or two to hit the tree. With users screaming, and the promise of a bit more stability - at least back in 2011/2012 - Debian made a bit more sense, especially when I had user data already preserved.
My backup strategy hasn't evolved much. If a system dies: I reinstall it, sync over world, install packages, sync etc/home and so on. I'm not sure if there's a better, "complete" system backup that'll also yield the ability to extract individual files right now. I've thought about doing AMANDA off and on, but it's complexity tends to shy me away.
I also like to think in this time that there aren't too many major blockers making it past QA  |
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The Doctor
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Joined: 27 Jul 2010
Posts: 2678
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| Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 11:02 pm Post subject: |
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Welcome! We always knew you would be back!
Look into rsnapshot. You can back up the entire system with emphasis on the most critical areas and less frequent updates to less important areas. It also keeps several iterations of the system available should you need to roll back.
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box. |
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JC Denton
Apprentice
Joined: 16 Apr 2003
Posts: 151
Location: USA
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| Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 11:27 pm Post subject: |
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| The Doctor wrote: | | Look into rsnapshot. You can back up the entire system with emphasis on the most critical areas and less frequent updates to less important areas. It also keeps several iterations of the system available should you need to roll back. |
Ah. I actually use rsnapshot Here are the areas I currently cover w/ my Debian systems:
| Code: | backup /etc/ ./
backup /opt/ ./
backup /root/ ./
backup /home/ ./
backup /var/log/ ./
backup /var/spool/cron/ ./
backup /usr/local/ ./
backup /usr/src/ ./ |
My problem is how do you quickly return to a functioning system with that from a total crash. |
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Marlo
Veteran
Joined: 26 Jul 2003
Posts: 1591
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| Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 1:05 am Post subject: |
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| Captain Kirk wrote: |
Here are the areas I currently cover ...
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Do not forget your worldfile:
| Code: | | backup /var/lib/portage/ |
But this "./" at the end of the line looks interesting. What does it do?
Thanks
Ma
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The Doctor
Moderator
Joined: 27 Jul 2010
Posts: 2678
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| Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 5:32 am Post subject: |
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Grab more.
You want to get the entire system so all you have to do is rsync. I recommend reading the gentoo wiki I linked before. 
_________________
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.
Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box. |
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charles17
Advocate
Joined: 02 Mar 2008
Posts: 3664
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| Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 6:11 am Post subject: |
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| Captain Kirk wrote: | | My problem is how do you quickly return to a functioning system with that from a total crash. |
I am using fsarchiver instead. It provides an option restfs for restoring the complete filesystem:
| man initramfs: | restore the first filesystem from an archive (first = number 0):
fsarchiver restfs /data/myarchive2.fsa id=0,dest=/dev/sda1
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Having restored your backup on an external device, you could grab for anything there. |
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JC Denton
Apprentice
Joined: 16 Apr 2003
Posts: 151
Location: USA
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| Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 6:16 am Post subject: |
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| Marlo wrote: |
But this "./" at the end of the line looks interesting. What does it do?
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My snapshot_root is an NFS submount that mounts on the host as /mnt/backups. On the backup server it maps to /mnt/tank/backups/$HOST. So in effect, you get /mnt/tank/backups/$HOST/hourly,daily,weekly, etc. It works out really well.
| The Doctor wrote: |
You want to get the entire system so all you have to do is rsync. I recommend reading the gentoo wiki I linked before.
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Indeed. Glad to see the wiki is in good shape. I still remember the old, old external Gentoo wiki that was lost and semi-resurrected.
Regarding rsnapshot, I'll likely expand it to doing all of "/" with some excludes like /proc, /dev, etc. I think that'll give me an operational system faster. |
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Hu
Moderator
Joined: 06 Mar 2007
Posts: 21619
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| Posted: Fri Sep 29, 2017 12:44 am Post subject: |
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| I typically use tricks with bind mounts to archive each logical filesystem separately. If you choose not to (and most people so choose), I suggest you inspect the list of mounted filesystems first to find all the special filesystems to exclude. You have a good start with /proc and /dev, but remember to catch also /run, /sys, and any areas which contain mounts of network filesystems. |
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