[GTALUG] Clean Ubuntu Install Tips

[Clifford Ilkay]

On 11/06/15 06:51 PM, Stephen wrote:
> I have been running Ubuntu for over a decade. Always did Internet 
> upgrades.
>
> But the last one, to 12.04 broke my PHP and the only solution I have 
> found is to do a clean install.
>
> I have /home on a separate drive so I expect that this is not a big 
> deal. But I think a few of you might be able to offer a tips.
>
> The system will be a desktop and also a LAMP server. I plan to install 
> the desktop and then add the AMP.
>
> I will back up the databases using mysqldump, save the Apache .conf 
> files as well as fstab.
>
> Anything else I should consider? Thanks
>

You could use a configuration management system to declare what the 
final state of the machine should be once you've finished. I've been 
learning SaltStack <http://docs.saltstack.com> over the last couple of 
days and I'm quite impressed. I'm using a masterless minion setup due to 
the fact that the machines that I'm deploying are intended to run behind 
a firewall with no access to the Internet. Here is a resource I found 
useful: 
<http://eon01.com/blog/using-saltstack-to-automate-vagrant-provisioning/>. 
You don't have to use Vagrant but you might want to once you see how 
easy it is to go from deploying your VM locally on VirtualBox to 
deploying to an Amazon EC2 instance, for example.

-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay

+1 647-778-8696