Ugh. I'd forgotten how annoying it is to reinstall existing systems.

I've spent close to two hours reinstalling my "backup" PC. (This is the machine which used to be my primary desktop, now it mostly exists to host backups of my websites, and the primary machine which replaced it.)

The intention was to reinstall so that I could setup a clean system with no desktop packages, and switch to using LVM. The machine hosts several Xen instances which are used to provide services such as DHCP + Debian package building.

Backing up the data was easy, the Sarge installer is a pleasure to use, and I even remembered to copy all my SSH host keys.

So why the pain?

Well the machine is running Sid. (Will stick to Etch when it is available I think), and several packages which had been running happily for months such as apt-cacher were temporarily uninstallable. In the case of apt-cacher I was able to use approx instead - so that wasn't a huge deal.

But one thing tripping me up is sound. It was my main desktop system and had sound working fine. Now I have alsa setup, all the mixer volumes up to the max, and yet nothing.

XMMS is playing happily - but absolutely no sound coming out. Apart from checking the mixer settings I can't think of what else to do. Not a huge deal but it is a minor irritation since sometimes people come over and want a machine to use for surfing, etc, and I like to give them a standard desktop with links to my MP3 share, etc.

Still all the main services are back up and running, GDM is available remotely via VNC, the logged in desktop is also shared via x11vnc, and the backups are starting to trickle back in.

The current partition scheme looks something like this:

/dev/hda1                         on / type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/mapper/vol-home     on /home type ext3 (rw,noatime)
/dev/mapper/vol-backups on /backups type ext3 (rw,noatime)

Then I have a couple of xen domains:

skx@itchy:~$ sudo xm list
Name                              ID Mem(MiB) VCPUs State  Time(s)
Domain-0                           0      873     2 r-----   230.8
builder.my.flat                    1      128     1 -b----    39.8
dhcpdns.my.flat                  1       96      1 -b----    39.8
skx@itchy:~$ 

Now time to find food, and water my plants.

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