Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!news.etla.org!nntp-feed.chiark.greenend.org.uk!ewrotcd!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Tim Watts Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: How do home users of linux protect themselves against ill-advised changes? Date: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 14:00:29 +0000 Lines: 36 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net j3yXMt8hIN0wu12ZvmXkmw1+po8h1SRxBxyBmo0IvM6aFCJSQN X-Orig-Path: squidward.dionic.net!not-for-mail Cancel-Lock: sha1:++yEtjUwUQJwcu779zeV10aKjeQ= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.3.0 In-Reply-To: Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:13206 On 04/01/15 13:33, The Natural Philosopher wrote: > On 04/01/15 12:16, Richard Kettlewell wrote: >> Jeremy Nicoll - news posts >> writes: >>> How do home users of linux protect themselves against ill-advised >>> changes? >>> >>> What I mean is, if they install patches or some package whose >>> configuration screws things up, and they then can't boot - what then? >> >> Restore from backup. >> > The question is pretty carzy to start with. > > Packages - unless they mess with the kernel/drivers - don't stop the > thing booting. Buggering up libc? Or as I had with ubuntu + ZFS, deciding the hostid was broken (it was null) and refusing to mount any ZFS volumes. > > Most driver cockups will allow booting in terminal mode and blacklisting > or de-installing of the offending driver anyway. > > New kernels don't *have* to be booted either. The grub gives options to > revert to earlier ones. > > Only time I restore, is during a complete distro upgrade: and then o#nly > as a guide to enabling the new distro > > > >