[Discuss] mirroring a machine.

[chris wakefield]

On Wednesday 24 January 2007 21:47, Michael Foltinek wrote:
> Are you installing and uninstalling a bunch of stuff? I can't see why
> just mirroring your homedir with Unison
> (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) wouldn't suffice.
> Alternatively, use the linux-live scripts to create a live CD of your
> base install plus your customizations.
>
> On 1/22/07, chris wakefield <blackcrow at shaw.ca> wrote:
> > Hi Gang.
> >
> > Recently I suffered a system crash (corrupted boot sector I think ...
> > kernel was up about 70 days), since then I did a re-install.
> >
> > (By-the-way, I have been using Reiserfs for about 4 years now and have
> > switched to ext3 now).
> >
> > Now, I would like to "mirror" my main debian machine to my "old" amd64
> > machine.
> > My goal is to always have a second identical box to use in case there is
> > another crash.
> > So my question is:  What's the best way to mirror a debian installation
> > with another box?
> >
> > I'm thinking maybe rsync, but maybe there's another way, system or
> > approach?
> >
> > Thanks for any ideas,
> > Chris W.
> > _______________________________________________
> > Discuss mailing list
> > Discuss at vlug.org
> > http://ladybug.vlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss

Hi Michael, thanks for the reply.

The reason I want to mirror my machine this way, is so that I can continue 
using it for my business and daily activities, without having to immediately 
drop everything to restore a home partition, or start editing menu.lst, 
xorg.conf or fstab, and the like etc.  I just want exchange boxes and 
continue.....:^)  I have a lot of stuff running on this box.

 I ended up using rsync, which seems to work ok, except that I have different 
partitioning on my second box, and it makes the setup more complicated... 
(wasn't thinking at the time....;^)

Also, I did discover that to get my box to boot was a simple matter of 
re-editing the /boot/grub/menu.lst.  Seems that grub will change those values 
as IT sees fit.  Somehow, when I rebooted after the "crash" grub changed the 
kernel links and the root drives to the wrong partitions - virtually from '0' 
to '1' and 'a' to 'b' ...

Unison looks great!  Thanks for that too,
Chris W.