On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> > also, you pretty much have to reconfigure everything from scratch, but if
> > you backed up /etc/somewhere, that's generally not too painful and
> > probably a good exercise, anyway, just to refresh your memory.
>
> As a matter of interest, what do you do after backing up your old /etc ?
> Do you just over-write the new /etc ?
oh, lord, no. i just use the old /etc files as a guide to help me
regenerate my configuration. while it takes more time, it more closely
simulates doing a fresh install -- i want to make it appear that i really
am installing from scratch so, in most cases, i might just consult the old
/etc files for what i had before.
one special case is to regenerate the old users and groups. you can't
just copy the old /etc/{passwd,shadow,group} files over top of the new
ones -- it's possible that there are new pseudo-user accounts that have
been added since the last release.
so i just extract the real-people user and group info from the old files,
and append that to the new files to restore my old user and group admin
info.
so far, it's worked pretty well.
rday
