Updated ISO images?

[Razvan Corneliu C.R. "d3vi1" VILT]

On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 02:54, Don wrote:
> Thanks for that info....
> Where I find newer ISOs are nice is in the event of a complete, clean,
> reinstall....
> 
> Periodically I wipe the entire system, and if I can reinstall from ISO
> images without then having to apply all sorts of updates... well, that just
> seems "easier". :-)
> 
> What I WOULD like is if the /home directory etc were all in a separate
> partition so when I says "reformat" to do a clean install, all MY stuff is
> not affected.

Well... in order to do that... you should migrate all the user accounts
first... it shouldn't be that hard... You have two options:
1) save /etc/passwd /etc/shadow /etc/groups /etc/gshadow and after the
reinstall replace them with the back-ups... That is not a solution
actually because there you also have info for system services and others
(e.g. apache)... And if you don't install apache also in the second
install you might have a ^small^ but never-the-less possible security
risk, or warnings in the logs such as /var/www does not exist...
2) create a small bash script which lists all the directories in /home
and creates users with the uid accordingly to the ones of the
directories
2bis) This is only a modification of the one above... create the script
which creates the users and then runs chown user:group /home/$user for
each entry...
> There's probably ways to do that, I just want it to be "automatic" when
> doing a "reformat this all automatically" for me...
> 
> Don