wildeabandon posted the other day about having gone through the ‘geek rite of passage’ of assembling a PC from parts from the first time.

I've never actually done that myself (I'm too lazy – I generally let the shop do it for me!), but I had a rite of passage of my own this week, namely my first ever full restore of a machine from backups. The firewall that died last Sunday is now running cheerfully again from its new flash card, with nothing lost beyond a week or so of logs I wasn't going to read anyway.

Of course, I couldn't do it the easy way. Oh no. Not for me the simple narrative of ‘flash card dies, haul spare out of drawer, format it, restore backup on to it, insert in firewall, boot up, away we go’. I didn't have the foresight to have laid in a spare card, so instead I restored the backup on to a spare corner of another computer's disk, then reconfigured the firewall (via some yak-shaving involving its kernel) to network-boot and NFS-mount its file system from there. It's been running happily in that configuration all week; the replacement card (and spare) arrived yesterday, so I've just transferred the file system back over, and it's now once again self-sufficient. While the machine was running diskless, I took the opportunity to upgrade its Debian installation (taking advantage of the unusual ease of making multiple copies of the filesystem to try things out), which I'd been meaning to get round to doing for far too long. As an added bonus, it now boots using GRUB (which was incompatible with its hardware last time I tried, but turns out to work fine in the latest version), so I no longer maintain any machine that runs the thoroughly irritating LILO. Hooray!

It's nice to have the lid back on the machine, and it's even nicer to know that the backups I've been religiously taking every week for a few years now really do work. (And with any luck they'll work even better next time: as a result of this exercise I've tweaked them a bit.)