[lug] dumpdates

[Chris Riddoch]

Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com> writes:

> On Fri, Aug 11, 2000 at 07:51:52PM -0600, Chris Riddoch wrote:
> >> Hey... Hugh.... so uhhh... member last night when I expressed my concern
> >> about making my box... well.... unbootable????
> 
> If you're mucking with the kernel, it's usually a good idea to have a
> boot floppy available.  Especially if you also run NT.  :-(
> 
> >and suspect it *could* do something bad if you didn't do it right,
> >make a copy of it.
> 
> In general good advice, except if you're on a redhat machine and you're
> working in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts on the "ifcfg-eth0" script,
> rename it to "old.ifcfg-eth0".  The boot scripts look for any file
> starting with ifcfg- and try to bring up the interface.  This can
> cause lots of problems if you name the script "ifcfg-eth0.old".

That's a really good point, I hadn't thought of that.  Debian does
things a little differently, and I haven't run into that sort of
problem yet.  A little CVS work would be a nice way to be able to back
out of changes.  It could be useful in many cases, but it wouldn't be
very practical to squeeze versioning systems onto the already packed
rescue floppies, and wrapper scripts around vi might have problems of
their own (temp files and such).

Perhaps someone could suggest something simple that would make it a
little easier for newbies to revert changes in /etc, if such a beast
exists?  I mean, besides the obvious "Don't do that" or "Reinstall",
which aren't very good answers to a two-line change in a config file.

--
Chris Riddoch
socket at peakpeak.com