Can I recover /var/log/packages after a disaster?

Randux · 04-04-2007, 04:02 PM

Hi guys,

Due to a faulty shell script I toasted my system. Lucky me, I had backed everything up 7 minutes before my runaway script. The only thing I lost was the package directory.

How can I get it updated? I can't use pkgtool to delete stuff because it doesn't think it's there. I have all the packages, too, but everything is already installed.

Thanks,
Rand

H_TeXMeX_H · 04-04-2007, 04:07 PM

What exactly did you wipe/toast ?

You can try a live CD (or even the slackware install CD/DVD), mount your HDD, cd into there and do something with the data.

Randux · 04-04-2007, 04:12 PM

Every hour I rsync my whole system onto another drive. I set up the backup script so I can boot right into the copy of the system. I lost the main system so I just restored it from the backups. The only thing I need to do now is to restore /var/log/packages. The only thing I didn't backup was /var/log.

rworkman · 04-04-2007, 04:13 PM

Well, if your system was fairly vanilla (no custom packages) and was a full install, you could copy over the /var/log/packages from another installation. If you had custom packages installed, you could still do that, but the information from those packages will be missing, so you could then do an "upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new" on the affected packages.
As a last resort, you could just do the upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new on the entire Slackware tree, and it *should* be fine, but no promises...

Randux · 04-04-2007, 04:27 PM

Thanks, I'll look at upgradepkg. I have a minimal install and about 75% custom packages after that.

Randux · 04-04-2007, 06:16 PM

Thanks Robby. I think the package directory is mostly ok now.

Rand

rworkman · 04-04-2007, 10:39 PM

Good deal - glad it worked out for you.
You're going to have a few *.new files lying around now. Do a:
find / -name "*.new"
to find them (most will be in /etc), compare them to the originals, and most likely discard them. A few can be discarded immediately - /etc/passwd, shadow, group, gshadow, perhaps others - you get the idea...

Randux · 04-05-2007, 09:21 AM

Hi Robby,

The only packages I had to reinstall were my own and 2 stock Slackware packages that were actually there but pkgtool was showing the wrong level. It took me a few hours to clean up the mess but it seems ok, I haven't found any problems. Nothing was missing except /var/log/packages but I didn't realize what a royal PITA it is to recover it. Now I'm backing that up too

Thanks a lot for the help

Rand

MS3FGX · 04-05-2007, 02:40 PM

Yeah, it might seem trivial, but you definitely want to make sure it is backed up. Actually backing up all of /var is not a bad idea. That way you would have the system logs from before the failure/disaster occurred, which might be helpful.

H_TeXMeX_H · 04-05-2007, 02:42 PM

I agree. There's no real reason not to back it up ... unless, of course, it is huge. But, that's usually not the case. For example /var is about 22 MB right now on my machine.

Randux · 04-06-2007, 05:40 AM

Hi guys,

I set up a mirror of my main system on another drive so I can boot into it if the primary drive fails. I didn't back up the package directory but I did back up most of /var. I'll have to think what the best way to go is now that I had my first test

. Nothing like a real disaster to test your disaster recovery plans.

Thanks for everyones help and comments.

Rand