reinstalling debian /bin

[christoph at linuxsoup.com (Christoph)]

Not to shift focus from Debian, but I have had good luck with Fedora
Core5 and Xen.  It's easy to install, setup & to create guests.  I am
not doing anything exotic other than convert 3 physical boxes
(NFS/BIND/LDAP server, Web/Squid Proxy, Mail Host) into 1 box.  All have
been running along nicely with no issues.  My guests are all FC5 hosts
running in the normal para-virtualized  mode.

Someday soon I hope to get a VT enable cpu/mobo (woodcrest/pacifica).

-cfd


On Sat, 2006-09-30 at 10:24 -0400, James Kramer wrote:
> Please excuse the late reply.  Thank you all for the help.  I have
> decided to reinstall the Debian system.  I have a backup of all the
> important files so it was a fairly quick install.  I use the system to
> run a few web sites so I wanted to assure that all the /bin files were
> available.  I almost have it back to normal.  I will make another
> attempt to set up Xen only this time I will be more careful which /bin
> directory I delete.  I am just thrilled to be able to experiment with
> all kinds of exotic software and not be burden by financing the
> endeavor.
> jay
> 
> On 9/20/06, James Kramer <kramerjm at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Everyone Thanks for the help.  I will try the advice this weekend.
> > Jay
> >
> > On 9/19/06, Alex Pennace <alex at pennace.org> wrote:
> > > On Sun, Sep 17, 2006 at 01:53:35PM -0400, James Kramer wrote:
> > > > While working on Xen setup I managed to delete /bin  by using the command
> > > > rm -R /bin. I don't think that I can recover the /bin files but I
> > > > should be able to reinstall the packages. I have a backup of all my
> > > > data files and most config files that were in /etc.  I can boot into a
> > > > different debian OS using grub so I can access the partition and
> > > > files.  I can chroot the particular partition.  Can someone suggest
> > > > how to reinstall the system.  If I do a complete debian reinstalll
> > > > from CD on top the partition would it retain my old directories and
> > > > files.  I tried to chroot the root partion figuring that I could use
> > > > apt-get to reinstall the packages but I can not figure out the proper
> > > > way to do it.
> > >
> > > You are going to encounter a chicken-and-egg scenario that is not
> > > going to be easy to back out of. The problem is many, many packages
> > > depend/predepend on programs in /bin. It is probably that an apt-get
> > > --reinstall will fail due to the missing files.
> > >
> > > "dpkg -S /bin" will list most packages that have files in /bin. (If
> > > the root directory in question is under /mnt, use "dpkg --root=/mnt -S
> > > /bin".) The files that are missed would be files created by package
> > > maintainer scripts instead of being unpacked through dpkg. This is
> > > almost a non-issue for /bin, but would be an issue for most other
> > > directories.
> > >
> > > Gather up the corresponding debs. For each deb, run dpkg -x (deb)
> > > (tmpdir). Copy over the files in (tmpdir)/bin into the target's
> > > /bin. Check the target's /bin/sh; make it a symlink to bash if it
> > > isn't already.
> > >
> > > You now have a Debian system that is 95% of the way to being
> > > whole. Boot into it and run apt-get --reinstall install (packages in
> > > question).
> > >
> > > As hinted above, there may be packages that do not unpack any files
> > > into /bin (and thus won't appear in dpkg -S /bin), but have maintainer
> > > scripts that create files in /bin behind dpkg's back. If you are
> > > truely concerned about that, then apt-get --reinstall install all the
> > > packages on the system. Be warned that this can cause other problems:
> > > It calls the maintainer scripts for every package, and some of them
> > > are not idempotent.
> > >
> >
> 


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