[Discuss] Dropping obsolete commands (Linux Pocket Guide)

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey (blu))]

> From: Discuss [mailto:discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On
> Behalf Of Steve Litt
> 
> > 1. dump and restore
> >
> > I grew up with these commands, but personally haven't used them in
> > well over a decade. What do you think?
> 
> I've never used them in my 17 year Linux usage.

I'm surprised to hear so many people saying they've never used dump & restore. If you backup using rsync/rsnapshot/tar/whatever, you're able to restore a system by reinstalling the OS manually, and reinstalling the same package list manually, and reconfiguring everything manually (or restoring /etc and hoping no package versions have changed anything meaningful) ... It's absolutely possible, but it's a pain.

Of course, the relatively new invention of configuration management tools greatly improve the above process.

If you want to backup the entire filesystem in such a way that all the above is unnecessary - you instead boot from rescue media, partition & format the hard disk, and simply run "restore" and boot back into the restored system as if no problem had ever occurred, then assuming you're using ext filesystems, you need dump & restore. (Or you need storage on some snapshotting storage system external to the system you're restoring.)


> > 3. telnet
> 
> To the extent that telnet is a diagnostic tool, you must keep it.
> Non-diagnostic use of telnet is circa 1995 and shouldn't be mentioned
> because nobody should ever use it.

See previous comments about netcat. Telnet is now obsolete for network diagnostics, which frankly, was a bastardization of its intended usage anyway.