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On 06/09/13 20:47, Simon Avery wrote: > And it really is easy. For benefit of others, it goes something like this; > > Check your automated backup systems are fresh and operating normally. Ha ha, this is epic! This is basically step 0 in every operation you will ever perform on *any* OS, particularly anything remotely dangerous. It's also quite a high bar to set for the most basic requirement of all unfortunately - c'mon, hands up, who actually has one of these?* Honestly? It's a bit like starting a tutorial with: firstly, ensure your system is entirely secured and has no bugs at all. Next up, do the following... But it is still really, really good advice. This is perhaps why Simon and I (and presumably others) don't particularly like or see the need for things like separate home partitions, which really strike me at least as an unnecessary restriction that I'm only going to have to fix at some point down the line when my /var or /opt partitions overflow and I end up having to shift partitions around, for no particularly useful reason. I just roam freely and seamlessly between buildings, networks, jobs, operating systems and computers - I can work on anything as long as I've got network access and a terminal secure in the knowledge that *all* of my goodies are neatly stored, secured and versioned in a combination storage/backup system just at the other end of a ssh connection. Even different linux flavours have bad habits of storing all your .dot files in different places, under different hierachies - let alone other OS's. Solaris stores user accounts under /export/$username instead of /home/$username by default for example, Cygwin creates a 'fake' user home under C:/cygwin/home and this is before we even touch on AIX, HP-UX, Irix, Windows, *BSD... Trying to maintain a static home directory that can seamlessly be transported through different systems is a disaster waiting to happen in my opinion/experience. Go on, just swipe your current /home from your main system on *buntu, rsync it over to a CentOS box, get your UID/GUID matched up and chown -R your permissions, and then try and log in. Just wait and see how much stuff will be broken. If anyone has ever tried teleporting a /home from any Linux to a Mac OS X box they will know how painful this can be... Your effort is far better spent on having a proper, easily and securely accessible store of all your important stuff (also known as "a backup"). On upgrading, moving machines, temporarily using machines, changing OS releases or even complete versions you just log in fresh to a new pristine functional environment, scp your setup-scripts.tar.gz into place and unpack. From there you obviously have your usual set of scripts to configure your environment, rsync/git clone/svnlite co/whatever the tool and data selection you want as appropriate. Well, that's how I roll anyway *shrugs* I guess it all depends on how you work though: if you don't have to use countless different machines and most OS's known to man on a weekly basis it's probably a much easier proposition to try migrating your /home through successive machines. I'd bet almost any money that old-schoolers like Gordon and Tom have got beautifully organised /homes with highly customised .tcsh and whatnot that they've been using seamlessly for 20+ years. Regards * puts hand up -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq