onward and backward

Five use cases:

• I'm working remotely
• I'm working remotely and I want to reboot but have everything come up again when done.
• I want to connect to my machine via SMB from a Windows machine like my netbook
• I want to have jobs going off at regular intervals
• I want to print.

Simple stuff, right?

• openssh-server
• grub
• samba
• crom
• cups

All of those packages don't work for me. Which is sick and bad and wrong. Did I mention the bad? So, I'm reinstalling.

At this second, really. I'm in the "try before you buy" part of the Ubuntu LiveCD, mounted on the office USB key.

One of the tricks I use, and this hardly rises to the level of trick, is to keep my /home on a separate partition from /, which means that everything I really value on a computer is safe while I wipe and pave over the operating system. I must admit that I didn't always do this, but I didn't always have 40GB (work) or 500GB (home) of drive to play with. Come to think of it, I have a 40GB drive for / at home as well as the big drive for /home.

But, while that's really helpful, there's more to remember.

Your crontab isn't saved in your home directory, so, when you wipe and reinstall, you lose your crontab, which, if you're like me, is as finely tuned a config as your .bashrc or your .vimrc or your .alias. So, the trick is to always save a copy of your crontab to a safe place. Schedule it. Put it in your crontab.

There's other considerations, too. I had an X11 problem that forced me to tweak my config to fix notify-osd, so I copied my xorg.conf to my home dir. I have a bunch of tools I use a lot that are not standard, so my apt sources.list has been changed. So I have that copied. I saved list of installed packages so I can start to reinstall the things I want without having to try to remember it all. Also, Ubuntu desktop defaults to DHCP, but my network address is hardcoded. I know that address, and if I forget it I can always nslookup myself to get it back.

Time to reboot.