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

[Hugo R. <hu...@bt...>]

Hi Kevin,

Thank you for your detailed feedback and your compliments. They are very much 
appreciated.

On Wednesday 30 January 2002 5:46 am, kevin rennert wrote:
> 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?

Mondo runs 'lilo -L' to setup your MBR. If that fails, it runs 'lilo' 
(without the -L). It is a bit inelegant but it usually works. Are you saying 
Mondo fails to initialize your Master Boot Record? If so, I would certainly 
like to see your logfile, which you can probaby find at 
/tmp/mondo-restore.log; the newer versions of Mondo save the restore-time log 
there, so that you don't have to remember to backup the log before you reboot 
after restoring.

> 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.

Interactive Mode should let you re-edit the mountlist. I've checked the loop 
and it looks okay. Were you restoring in Nuke Mode?

> 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.

Did you switch filesystems, or leave them as ext2/ext3? If the latter then 
I'm puzzled. I use RH7.2 with LABELs in my fstab and I don't get that 
problem. It sounds as if the partitions aren't belng labeled. May I see your 
LABEL'd fstab file, please? BTW, does it make a difference if you say "no" 
when asked if you have modified the mountlist?

> 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?

OK, I'm on it.

> 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. 

I'm guessing that you're talking about what happens when Mondo cannot find 
your default kernel. In that situation, please add '--my-kernel 
/boot/vmlinuz' to the call to Mondo-Archive. Replace 'vmlinuz' with the name 
of your kernel's file in /boot.

-Hugo