[Mondo-devel] one man's story backing up RedHat 7.2

[kevin r. <ke...@re...>]

Hey all,

First off, I finally figured out all of the various things 
going wrong with my earlier attempts to use mondo/mindi, and am
ecstatic now to have such a great tool for backing up and cloning my
system.  Many props to you, Hugo, mondo truly does rock and seems to
get better every day.  

I still have a few questions that I've not seen covered on the mailing
list or in the README or the manual or the FAQ, and a few comments
that might help new users out if they see the posting. My apologies to
the rest of you if this gets to be abysmally long, this is as much one
users story of getting mondo to work correctly with a RH 7.2 system as
it is bug-reporting or feature requesting. 

I'm using mondo-1.37 and mindi 1.55 on a Redhat 7.2 athlon system with
an asus a7v133 motherboard. 
I've  been trying to use mondo to back up my system and restore it to a
reiserfs only pair of hard drives (RH forces you to use ext3).

Problems I ran into from the perspective of a new-ish user:

1 - For some reason, the RedHat 7.2 install put the 'linear' flag in my
lilo.conf. That's fine, (though it works fine with LBA32 mode), but
when mondo-restore calls lilo with the -L option, lilo complains and
quits without doing anything and I had to tweak it myself until I
removed the 'linear' option. Does it make sense to test the file for
the 'linear' option before automatically telling it to use LBA32 mode? 

2 - After lilo would bomb out, I would get the endless repeated question
-- 'edit mountlist again', to which the only proper answer appeared to
be 'no'. If I selected yes, it would just flash and ask me
again... and again... and again... This actually was happening with
mindi-0.53, but I'll test it with mindi-0.55 tomorrow morning. 

3- If my /etc/fstab contains that weird LABEL=/ notation that redhat
seems to want to use, after restoring, the boot process fails when it
goes to mount on / . This is easily fixed by just making  the LABEL
line look more like a regular fstab line, but I have no idea why it
doesn't work, and someone new might not know to do this. 

4 - All biggiefiles seem to be restored owned by root. Most of my
system files that end up being biggiefiles are indeed root's, but I
just backed up my /home directory and a bunch of wav files (and my
mbox)  in my home dir got restored as root's. Is there any way to
change this, or is it just a product of the slicing?

5 - this one has nothing to do with mondo, just my own stupidity:
I was trying to convert all of the ext3 filesystems RH insisted on to
reiserfs, and was foolishly trying to boot off of a reiserfs partition
-- No dice -- unless perhaps you can get it to mount with the notail
option (untested). Make sure to just create a small ext2 boot partition
and all will be grand.

6 - Also, just for kicks I tried using the text-mode. This worked great
for the most part, except that when it asks you questions about your
kernel, the messages don't actually make it to the screen. The only
way I could read them (and answer them) was by looking at the tail end
of /var/log/mondo_archive.log . 

BTW, being able to point mondo-restore to a dir that just has iso's in
it is totally sweet. I had an old 3 gig drive laying around that I
dumped  the iso's on, and restored my whole system to a different hard
drive in about 15 minutes. 

Ok, that's all. I think. Thanks again for all of your hard work,
Hugo, the software's pretty righteous.  
My brother the (paid) sysadmin is still incredulous that the
piece of linux software I'm absolutely most excited about of late is for
the
seemingly mundane purpose of making backups...

Thanks,
Kevin