Server reinstall

I tried to update my Shuttle XPC from Fedora 11 to 13 via yum. I’m pretty sure my system got horked with respect to yum right before this effort when I did my last yum update. It stopped being able to connect to the servers.

Once I determined it was in a bad state, I went ahead and copied off most of the data I knew was important. Yes, I missed something. :->

The data I tend to copy off is:

1. Home directories
2. /etc
3. /usr/local
4. /var/<domainname> – web site(s)
5. /var/named

What I failed to get this time was /var/spool/mail. I guess I either thought /var was too big or too deeply nested. This is despite the fact I had over 100G more free space on my backup drive than the server’s hard drive.

So I lost a couple thousand email messages that remained in inboxes rather than being saved. Since I tend to hoard the stuff, no biggie.

The install over didn’t work as well as I would have liked, so I did a fresh install. I wasn’t that impressed with the installer – it seemed to take too long discovering the disk and skipped over some of the screens (e.g., it would consistently skip over the installation method {cd} and try to find the image on a drive slice).

After the install was done, I had to configure the following services from my backup:

1. /etc/passwd
2. DNS
3. mail
4. ssh
5. sudo
6. dovecot
   1. Don’t forget to generate your own certificate to enable SSL
7. httpd
8. noip

I hate that it makes you create an user before you can do anything and it goes ahead to create a group at the same time.

The other complication here is that since this is my only DNS server, I have to do tricks on my other machines to get outside to documentation. (Hence my desire to have a backup server ready to go on a moment’s notice).