[lug] Personal 'layer'

[Scott Rohling]

That's where I'm headed - and thanks to David and his deb example, I'm not
far away.  I don't think it's an abuse of the package manager at all, it's
exactly what it's meant to do - we're just using it to package our personal
data and setup.  That's what I'm meaning by 'personal layer' essentially.

I help customers do this on RedHat with rpm's (RedHat install, a layer for
the company's security policies (security settings, pam.d files, sshd,
whatever), a layer for standard apps (e.g. Nagios agent, backup agent, etc),
a layer for the hardware platform (x86,sparc,s390x,etc) for drivers and
other platform specific stuff.  With smart rpms, you can roll our RH to
different hardware platforms (ifarch in rpm) and maintain the same
package/layer structure.

Anyway - ideally - what I'm after is a .deb file which contains my setup -
maybe even includes /home?  You could rebuild the .deb each night with some
automation..  and then just back that up.

Thanks for the ideas thus far!!

p.s.  The reason I'm after this is that one of my interests is in testing
new distros or helping out with beta testing for Ubuntu -- so rebuilding
from scratch is sometimes necesary to test the install process.

p.p.s.  I heard about something called 'Clonezilla' that that is a live CD
to allow you to backup your Windows, Linux stuff as partitions..  something
else I want to look into as a means to restore things back to a particular
state (and then apply mystuff.deb!)

Scott



On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 10:07 AM, durist at frii.com <durist at frii.com> wrote:

> A while back I was contemplating trying to use the package manager to
> create
> packages containing my personal files, plus a sort of overlay package
> containing any customizations to the system (i.e. config files in /etc). My
> thought was I could then just automate the package creation process and
> back
> up those packages every night, and it would make system upgrades very easy.
>
> I know this is probably an abuse of what the package manager is meant to
> do,
> but it just seems like such a neat solution.
>
> Has anybody tried this?
> --
> Dan Urist
> durist at frii.com
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