A Precautionary Tale.
Hello all,
Just wanted to do a little writeup about a horrible experience i had.
Through no fault of my own, the only LAN connection on my home unit (whitebox) blew out. Being the paranoid soul that I am, i disabled the ability to hit the WebAdmin via the WAN interface. And being the lazy person that i am, neglected to create any form of offsite backup (ie: email/manual onto desktop).
My Configuration is pretty substantial, enough to have me waste the better part of a saturday rebuilding from scratch. So the last thing i wanted to do was do that. However, bieng the tech god (ok, not really) i am, i decided there had to be a better way.
I figured i had two options, tinker with the console, or just try and get a backup file from the hard drive some other way.
Since i had a replacement motherboard, i decided to go right ahead and do the logical thing and swap out what was broken. Unfortunately since the MAC's did not match up, this lead me nowhere.
Next i decided i could probably find the file somewhere on the hard drive if i looked hard enough. So i tossed it into an External enclosure and dug around a bit. There was a lot to look through, and not too much that could be done (or atleast i thought at the time).
I thought i was out of doable options, the last thing i wanted to do was fire up the console and tinker, but since i had nowhere else to turn i put on my cautious pants and crossed my fingers and dove in.
Now, most people here are probably comfortable with the Linux command line/shell, i am not one of those, i'm spoiled by working with Windows products exclusivly. I used to play around with linux (back when Fedora was called Fedora Core, yikes is that a long time ago) but through years of non-use i lost all skill in Linux-Fu.
Now, i'm not going to let you in on how i managed to get the commands and locations i needed, thats my little secret, but i'm willing to leak out what's needed to do this (since i can't be the only one who's been in this boat.
Words of Warning: this was done on a software install, i don't know if this will work the same way on a piece of hardware. Additionally using the root console will void your support if you have it, so only do this as a last resort.
First, mount up your drive:
cd /mnt
mkdir /hd1
fdisk -l
Find the name of your flash/hard drive (mine was /dev/hdb1)
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hd1
cd /hd1
dir (to verify you mounted)
Now we need to find your backup files:
backup.plx -l
This will list your configuration files, tell you if it was a manual or auto-backup, and give you a date. Just to be safe i'd reccomend not doing the latest auto-backup.
Now, we need to find the real file, not just the name:
cd /var/confd/var/storage/snapshops
dir (to ensure that they are there)
Now we need to issue the copy command and put it on the external drive:
cd /mnt/hd1
cp /var/confd/var/storage/snapshops/(your config file) /mnt/hd1
dir (to verify)
Now that that's done, you can go ahead and re-install the software on your new hardware (i advise using a new hard drive, in the odd event that the configuration file is corrupt)
All you need to do now is leave the drive in the machine while it installs and reboots and the config file should be installed for you. If not you can load it up in the WebAdmin
Now, in theory it is possible to pull this file outside of the console from another computer. I have not tried it, and while there is no express notification that this will void a service contract, keep that in mind if you do decide to go that route.
The moral of the story is to have a disaster recovery plan, do regular backups!
I probably spent all the time it would have taken to reconfigure from scratch if you include my research, but it was worth it.
Mods/Admins, if this is in the improper place, i apologise.
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