On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 02:54, Don wrote:
Thanks for that info.... Where I find newer ISOs are nice is in the event of a complete, clean, reinstall....
Periodically I wipe the entire system, and if I can reinstall from ISO images without then having to apply all sorts of updates... well, that just seems "easier". :-)
What I WOULD like is if the /home directory etc were all in a separate partition so when I says "reformat" to do a clean install, all MY stuff is not affected.
Well... in order to do that... you should migrate all the user accounts first... it shouldn't be that hard... You have two options: 1) save /etc/passwd /etc/shadow /etc/groups /etc/gshadow and after the reinstall replace them with the back-ups... That is not a solution actually because there you also have info for system services and others (e.g. apache)... And if you don't install apache also in the second install you might have a ^small^ but never-the-less possible security risk, or warnings in the logs such as /var/www does not exist... 2) create a small bash script which lists all the directories in /home and creates users with the uid accordingly to the ones of the directories 2bis) This is only a modification of the one above... create the script which creates the users and then runs chown user:group /home/$user for each entry...
There's probably ways to do that, I just want it to be "automatic" when doing a "reformat this all automatically" for me...
Don