... But I want snapshot capabilities, or something like system restore in Windows. This is obviously for times when I shoot myself in the foot and want to restore back to a stable state ...
I am a big fan of Virtual Machine technology. Here is what I do:
On my main workstation I install a small, stripped-down (i.e. no Office, etc.) Linux distribution as a host -- I prefer Debian GNU/Linux. I then install Virtualbox and create a VM. On the VM I install my day-to-day work environment -- again Debian.
Whenever I have mods to install, I use VB to take a snapshot. Then I install the mods. I leave the snapshot for some time (it's a CoW). If it works for a few days, a week, etc., then I merge the collected CoW changes into the VM (by, ironically, deleting the snapshot). If the mods fail to run, I restore the running system. I've had to do the restore perhaps 3 times in years, and it goes quite quickly, as does the creating and merging of the CoW.
Finally if the VM seems OK, then I install the mods into the host system.
For a plan for backup, we use a separate computer as a backup server, and on that we have a set of mirrored disks. We use that to run rsnapshot to backup our running, day-to-day systems. ( You might be able to run rsnapshot on the running system itself, in which case you can then use LVM, and rsnapshot will do its own LVM snapshot, do the backup, and remove its snapshot; then you could, say, tar up the resulting backup and send it to another computer ).
We have a small shop and rsnapshot helps us in many ways. The rsnapshot utility is a pull system, so the remote needs passphrase-less access to the system being backed up. The big advantage of rsnapshot is that it uses hard links, so conserving storage dramatically. For example, I backup my day-to-day system every hour, day, week, month, so 24+7+4+12 -> 47 collections, yet rarely goes over 20 GB, but oddly, if you look at any single collection, it is 20 GB, all due to the magic of hard links. The code also uses an algorithm that it transfers only the changes of a particular file, thus saving real time and network time. It also handles all renaming, copying, and removing of necessary files to accomplish the rotation of backup collection names.
We are also interested in the zfs filesystem. Our rsnapshot backup server was replaced this month with a newer model -- the old one lasted 17 years (2005..2020). In addition to being an external backup, I also installed VBox there and, as VMs, installed as guests Ubuntu 19.10 on zfs, as well as FreeBSD 12 on zfs. Since the host is on a RAID1 mirror, I didn't need the additional support for zfs mirroring (but it might be of some interest later on to experiment with them). We've had a Solaris VM for a long time on zfs:
As additional VMs, we also installed a guest that is the same as the host, and we're using that as a test bed (just as I do with my day-to-day workstation). This new install is of distribution Debian GNU/Linux buster. We also like to have the next rev available, so I installed the testing version, known as bullseye.
So VMs are what we use for experimentation, as well as to make backups, like MS System Restore Points, easy.
We are looking into buying a new software, billing software that is, and want to know if you can run that on the same UNIX server as another major software?
Is there a limit to the different types of software Unix can run, or is it like windows where you can install as many as you like?
... (2 Replies)
Hi there.
I've been tasked with making a new design for our Unix systems :eek:
Now the question I have is;
How many LPARs can a p570 hold WITHOUT using a VIO Server.
Many Thanks
Kees (1 Reply)
Hi.
I downloaded a package that could only be installed on RHEL5, and not 4 or 3, so I got the source in order to compile it on RHEL 3 so hopefully it will work on all versions.
So I have the source for a working package, but when I build it in RHEL 3 and then try to install it in RHEL 5, it... (6 Replies)
I'm looking for a means to ensure that servers in the two or three datacenters, connected in a ring via IP through two ISPs, can distribute load and/or replicate data among at least two SAN-class disk devices.
I want to evaluate several solutions, and I'm open to solutions ranging from free,... (6 Replies)
I've got a Solaris 11 Express installed on my machine. I have created a raidz2 zpool named shares and a simple one-disc zpool named backup. I have made a script that would send a daily snapshot of shares to backup.
I use these commands
zfs snapshot shares@DDMMRRRRHHMM
zfs send -i shares@....... (10 Replies)
I wonder if anyone could assist with some problems I'm having with Linux Capabilities and their use when using the commands "nice" and "schedtool".
I run a couple of PCs, one is an elderly AMD Sempron 2800+ (32-bit, 2GHz clock and 3GB memory) that is used as a family multimedia system running... (3 Replies)
So I'm having a problem getting a Broadcom BCM4312 wireless controller to work under the broadcom-wl module
$uname
Linux 3.8.11-200.fc18.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed May 1 19:44:27 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
lspci -v
05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g... (2 Replies)
Hi
I'm trying to compile my linux kernel with CONFIG_SECURITY_CAPABILITIES=y.
any idea what this thing does ??
Also another question , If I compile the kernel that I'm currently using , what'll happen ?
~cheers (3 Replies)
Hi All,
How worried is everyone about the Dirty Cow Linux exploit? Has anybody experienced attacks yet?
From the research I've done it seems that the exploit is "reliable" (that is it works nearly every time on vulverable systems) which is not good news.
We all believe that Unix/Linux... (3 Replies)