Re: [Sheflug] A mixed bag of problems

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Brown <simon [at] cliffestones.demon.co.uk> writes:

    Simon> The Box is a Mandrake machine, I forget which version, but
    Simon> not the current one. What we plan to do is download the
    Simon> latest Mandrake distro burn to CD and install on the new
    Simon> drive. So can I notwithstanding any alarming changes in the
    Simon> Mandrake file layout delete the new /etc directory and cp
    Simon> the old one across?

No, you cannot delete it.  In fact, in this situation you can't just
cp at all, because there is a good chance the directory layout has
changed.

What you should do, if at all possible, is reconfigure the _current_
setup on the new disk, then upgrade from the fresh Mandrake CD.  That
will preserve all current settings.

If you really want a fresh install, you should install the new
Mandrake, then pay careful attention to the man pages for the various
programs.  In particular, look at login(1), passwd(1,5),
useradd/adduser(8), shadow(5) to see what files they use and are
related.  (Eg, you probably haven't made any changes to /etc/skel, but
if you have you need to preserve those.)  If any of those man pages
are missing, I would recommend a new distro, not just a new version
;-)

Tar up the whole current /etc hierarchy not withstanding; you can't
remember what tweaks needed to be made to get things running well, but
they're all recorded in /etc.  Then after installing, do

cd /tmp; tar xvzf etc.current.tar.gz
diff -ur /tmp/etc /etc 2>&1 | less

(you might even want to redirect that last to a file).  The reason for
the stderr redirect is that missing or added files are probably even
more important than changed files.

You could also just do diff -qr, to get a list of added, missing, and
changed files.  But I find that unreliable; looking at the full list
is better.


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