Further Adventures In Rebuilding My Linux Machine.

(Please pardon my technobabble…)

I realized pretty quickly that I’d done a bad thing by not backing up my /home directory like I should have on the same weekly timeline as I back up the NAS and the art room Mac. But there was another piece of the puzzle that I needed to back up too apparently, and that was my /etc folder, because that had the fstab file in it which tells the system how to mount its drives. More specifically, how to mount my NAS. First thing I needed to accomplish in this rebuild is getting my NAS (that’s Network Attached Storage) mounted. That is where I keep my important data.

A further complication was I use a credential file during the mount process, rather than have the mount credentials written into the fstab file. I keep that credential file somewhere only root can access it. And to even further complicate things, I use an odd local IP address for the Router and its kingdom, not your usual 192.168.1.1 thing, and thereby also the NAS. I had backups of my home directory and the fstab file, but they were old and did not have my current IP addresses for mounting the NAS. So I didn’t have my current NAS credential file, And didn’t have the current fstab file which would have told me at least what IP addresses I was using locally.

Basically I was just keeping some of that stuff in grey cell memory, or worse, just lackadaisically letting the browser cache and password manager just pop the correct values into the address bar and the password field. At least I had the router password in my commercial password manager…but not its IP address, which I should have added to the notes about that login. So I was in a bit of a catch-22 position.

Being as when I have it in the docking station, my Linux machine is hard wired into the router network, I didn’t need its password to get logged onto my LAN, which I would if I tried to use the WiFi. The easy thing was just open a terminal and use ifconfig to see my address, and that should jog my memory as to the local ip address format I am currently using. Then I can log into my router and find the address of my NAS.

Hahahahahaha ifconfig has been Depreciated!

Okay…so ‘hostname -I’

At some point I reckon I need to start using the new and most wonderful new thing which is ‘ip’ and become familiar with all its wonderful arguments. Okay…irritated me aside, there was actually one that would have saved me a Lot of effort: ‘ip neigh’. This would have told me my address and that of the router and the NAS too. Yes, yes…Much better. But I am stubborn. After I finished with this I installed the depreciated network tools package to get ifconfig back. But at least now I know about ‘ip neigh’.

So now I have the router ip. So I go to its page and…I have no idea what my router’s page password is. Oh wait…at least I had that one in my commercial password manager and it actually does prepopulate the credential fields for me. So I log in and check the NAS address. Then I try to log into the NAS to verify its credentials…which I never put into the commercial password manager, and the old credential file does not have the current NAS password. So I couldn’t get in, which means I can’t regenerate the credential file and mount the NAS.

Apparently it was the browser password manager that was always filling that in, not the commercial password manager. So I never put it in there. Swell. But when I reinstalled chrome and logged into my google account that should have brought all the browser passwords over too, but chrome was not filling in the password field for the NAS and I freaked that maybe they’d all been blown away in the crash. In desperation I checked the google password manager and found it in there. Why it wasn’t automatically populating that field I have no idea, but first thing I did was create a login for the NAS in the commercial password manager and put the right credentials into it. I’d really rather the browser wasn’t doing passwords and this is why.

So now I had my NAS address and credentials. Now I could reestablish that credential file and add the fstab directive to mount my NAS. But instead of using the location specified in the most recent fstab file I’d backed up, I just winged it from memory…which by now I should know better than to do…and sure enough the location I had in grey cell memory wasn’t it. At some point I’d put it somewhere only root could get to it instead of just depending on its file access permissions and that it is a hidden dot file. Fine. I corrected that problem and finally, Finally, I had my NAS mounted and I had access to my data.

First item of work was establishing a weekly home directory backup to the NAS. I created a folder, ‘suse_home_current’ and created an rsync command string from the ones I had backed up for doing the weekly NAS to USB drive backups, and gave it an initial run. I’ve only just started to rebuild my SuSE machine and already the .cache/google folder was a monster, so I decided to exclude it. The nice thing about chrome is it resync’s a fresh install with all your plugins and stuff so I don’t think backing up the cache is really necessary. Next step is to create a back up for /etc, so I always have the current fstab and httpd.conf stuff and anything else I might need to recreate for the next time I have a system drive crash.

Because…yeah…I Knew this would happen sooner or later, I just didn’t think it would be such a big deal as long as I had my data in the NAS and the NAS is two RAID 1 mirrored drives and backed up with a rotating set of USB drives.

But…no. At some point I should probably just invest in a whole drive backup process for the Linux box, like I have for the Macs.