Deleted part of /var, what to do?

Message

Nordmats · Post by **Nordmats** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 6:33 pm

Hi

I managed to delete something in /var, dont know what but I can't restart anything in /etc/init.d/. When I try I get /var/lib/softlevel not a file or directory. I have tried to reemerge some pakages to see if it would fix it but no. Can anyone please help me???

monkeyboy · Post by **monkeyboy** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 7:21 pm

If you deleted unknown things in /var you could end up with all kinds of weird problems. You could try re-emerging everything on your system (assuming things are super b0rked) to make sure nothing important is gone. If that doesn't work, I BELIVE you can boot to the live cd, decompress a stage1 tarball, and re-bootstrap your system to fix gcc, glibc, and such. If you don't know what's missing it will be extremely hard to put just that stuff back. You can speed up the process if you use the buildpkg use flag option, emerge -K will install the binary packages you have already compiled.

Nordmats · Post by **Nordmats** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 7:25 pm

I added default to the softlevel file and rc began working so-so. But When i try to do emerge -ep world only the pakages I emerged after show up.

linuxtuxhellsinki · Post by **linuxtuxhellsinki** » Mon Nov 07, 2005 10:44 pm

I don't have /var/lib/softlevel -dir at all also

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 5:36 am

I, interestingly enough, managed to delete my whole /var directory. Currently I'm doing a full emerge sync && emerge -e system && emerge -e world; I'll post the results in the morning. I'll either be happy as hell or be crying like a 2-year-old with his/her candy stolen

Wish me luck

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 12:01 pm

Well things were nicely broken. The core system stuff works fine; I now have to go and figure out which packages I had installed before as my world file is gone. All in all this has been an interesting experience for me.

Main notes for anyone else who borked the system like I have:
re-emerge system
re-emerge any other packages you having installed that aren't in the base system
make sure sshd works

kill all your service processes and restart them
be brave, try a restart

That is all

nevynxxx · Post by **nevynxxx** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 1:47 pm

Why does noone ever think of the obvious?

Get a stage <whatever> tarball, and extract /var from it.

That will get you what you *need* back.

Make sure you don't overwrite anything in /var that you have not deleted though, it is more uptodate.

How you you expect to be able to emerge world if you have deleted /var/lib/portage/world?

Don't bother emerging system or world, just re-remerge packages that complain thereafter. /var is for machine generated code, and most sanly written packages just create what they need if it is not already there.

your screwed if you deleted /var/mysql or /var/www etc.

Nordmats · Post by **Nordmats** » Tue Nov 08, 2005 5:23 pm

Figured I'd do that but that won't bring back my world file. Tried to manually add pakages into it but no. Anyone know how to iject pakages into the world file?

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Wed Nov 09, 2005 4:45 am

nevynxxx wrote:Why does noone ever think of the obvious?

Get a stage <whatever> tarball, and extract /var from it.

That will get you what you *need* back.

Make sure you don't overwrite anything in /var that you have not deleted though, it is more uptodate.

How you you expect to be able to emerge world if you have deleted /var/lib/portage/world?

Don't bother emerging system or world, just re-remerge packages that complain thereafter. /var is for machine generated code, and most sanly written packages just create what they need if it is not already there.

your screwed if you deleted /var/mysql or /var/www etc.

When you re-sync portage and then 'emerge system -e' that rebuilt the system for full usablilty. Then I untared my backed up log files and took a look at what ebuilds I had emerged and re-emerged the list (I love teh regex).

Only things I couldn't get back were my MySQL dbs and my web pages (thankfully there were only a few small things).

nevynxxx · Post by **nevynxxx** » Wed Nov 09, 2005 8:55 am

Malcolm wrote: When you re-sync portage and then 'emerge system -e' that rebuilt the system for full usablilty. Then I untared my backed up log files and took a look at what ebuilds I had emerged and re-emerged the list (I love teh regex).

Only things I couldn't get back were my MySQL dbs and my web pages (thankfully there were only a few small things).

I guess I'd just rather not have t use the -e flag anytime ever. Then again my gentoo box is a K6-II 450, so even emerge -e system takes a wee while!