ajayshah@alhena.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) (06/30/91)
In article <1991Jun30.040650.147@uniwa.uwa.oz> root@ec.uwa.oz.au (Operator) writes: >I don't know if this has been done before, or if someone >has done something similar but I thought I post this idea >before I implement it and see what types of responses I get > >The idea comes from the hassles we have in that students >in out lab are always writing files onto our harddisks and >there a hassel to get rid of or they actually change files >on the harddisk. A relatively simple brute-force stragey is as follows: - everytime someone complains about (say) the Turbo Pascal as installed on the HD having got clobbered, reinstall it from backup. The best way to keep these backups is via zipping off a installed file system. Installing (say) TP from Borland distribution disks is a huge pain. You have to setup default compile options, etc. - Regularly (say, every month), do a rm -rf / on each machine and recover from backup. This recovery can be off a [zip|tar] file on a network disk. If there are four machines, then the sysadmins should do one such fresh-start a week. The choice of which machine to do each week should not be fixed. I.e., each monday, when the fresh-start is going to be done, we draw a random machine. -- _______________________________________________________________________________ Ajay Shah, (213)734-3930, ajayshah@usc.edu The more things change, the more they stay insane. _______________________________________________________________________________