Hi. I'm quite an OpenBSD newbie, and I keep on trying a whole lot of things and switch forth and back from pdaXrom, Cacko and OpenBSD.
Right now I'm using my C3000 only to play music / C++ coding / wardriving. OpenBSD does those things quite well, and being able to SSH into my zaurus to change the currently playing song is quite fun
But I'm starting to mess with the kernel, building the patches iamasmith provided to fix the X event buffer bug, and I would like to "revert" the zaurus to a previous backup, the fastest way possible. I am not using any form of backup right now. I've looked at amanda, rsync, or just "tar"ing the whole disk. What would be perfect would be a background backup to a remote samba directory executed between certain hours when the zaurus is idle.
What are you using to backup / restore your precious little machine ?
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Since the Kernel is monolithic you don't need to worry about kernel modules, backing them up etc.
When you build a kernel it produces a file called bsd which you can boot... when testing I typically copy it to /bsd.test and when the boot prompt comes up I type in bsd.test leaving my old Kernel in place until I am sure I haven't broken anything.
For backups you may want to look at rsync or if you want a nice way to sync text changes back and forth consider unison.
If using rsync for backup check the option list.. you certainly want to make sure you have the -a (archive flag) and probably want to use the z flag for compression. rsync will 'just find' ssh and use if it you do something like..
rsync -avz myzaurusname:/home/myname ./mybackup
Now be careful about a couple of things... if you want to sync data then rsync is good, if you want to backup a snapshot you need to be very careful... firstly you need to be root to preserve uid/gid, secondly rsync is clever and if you have a user called fred on your local system and a user called fred on the remote with different uids then rsync will map fred to fred and change the uid on the files if copies.. true snapshots can be accomplished as follows..
rsync -avz --numeric-ids myzaurusname:/ ./myZaurusBackupDir
you may wish change your mind about using the -z option if you have a lot of large already compressed files since it can waste a lot of time.
I run moinmoin as a PIM Wiki and I use unison to sync the wiki data between a Gentoo box and my Zaurus running OpenBSD so I can edit the wiki on either and then sync it back. unison has a rather neat feature of being able to sync conflicts using diff/patch
- Andy
