NewTlug Meetings:2004-02-24
From GTALUG
As promised in this month's NewTLUG meeting announcement, here is a detailed description of Henry Spencer's presentation and bio...
Surviving system upgrades, and even downgrades Henry Spencer
Upgrading a system to the latest release of your favorite Linux distribution can be an awful headache if you've made local modifications, or even if you just have your own files you want preserved. And of course, even distributions which claim to do graceful incremental upgrades don't always deliver on those promises. Being halfway through an upgrade and having it croak because of (for example) a broken RPM dependency is worse than no upgrade at all.
Henry has evolved an alternative approach: upgrading (or even downgrading) by reinstalling the system from scratch. Cautious filesystem layout keeps user files unscathed, and some organizational tricks and automated tools permit most local customizations to be re-done in seconds.
Henry Spencer got his BSc at University of Saskatchewan and his MSc at University of Toronto, and worked as a Unix systems programmer and sysadmin at University of Toronto for a number of years before becoming an independent consultant.
His system was the first Usenet site in Canada (and the first outside the US), and he's well-known as a Usenet contributor in many areas, notably the space groups. He and Geoff Collyer wrote C News -- once the main transport software of Usenet -- and more recently he and David Lawrence wrote "Managing Usenet" for O'Reilly. His archive tapes were the base for Google's 20-year Usenet archive.
After nearly 20 years as a Unix sysadmin he stopped doing system administration, although he has been known to do sysadmin-automation software. He's been involved (off and on) with both the C standard and POSIX. He has written various freely-available software packages, including several regular-expression libraries, and was technical lead for the FreeS/WAN project (IPsec secure networking for Linux) for several years. Somewhat to his surprise, he now finds himself making money doing spacecraft engineering in addition to software work.
