On Mon, 10 May 2004, Craig White wrote:

> I don't recall seeing anything like that in the distro's that I've
> worked with. This is mostly unnecessary since the the two reasons for
> this feature are to overcome virus damage or installation damage where
> an older dll overwrites a newer dll. Even Windows has implemented a
> method to keep the overwrites from occurring now.

I rarely touch Windows, but in-laws (who used NetBSD and then Linux for a
year before buying a new computer) needed my help.

They had the sasser worm. I followed the instructions (so I thought) at
the Microsoft.org website. I did a Windows Update and chose yes to update.
Then it suggested I needed to restart the system.

So I did.

The system failed to come back up and was missing a DLL. My mouse moved on
a blank screen but nothing else was shown. Booting to safe mode didn't
help. Then my Windows friend suggested that I boot using "last known
configuration" and it worked.

I still had the sasser. Many processes starting faster than I could stop
them. Anyways, I manually removed the binaries, removed some registry
startups with regedit, and turned on the Xp firewall. All is well now, I
guess.

For Linux, this couold probably be easily done a couple ways:

- backup all configs in a tarball (that is dated)

- backup all system commands and libraries
 or alternatively:
- have a list of installed packages with exact version numbers and
  packages readily available

Then to recover to last known configuration have a script that backups
broken configuration and overwrites with new.

> I suppose that if you had a corrupted 'package' on Linux, you could do
> something like 'apt-get -f install package' to put the original binaries
> back in place.

dpkg can output a list of packages installed and can use same list to
install. (But --get-selections doesn't seem to have package versions.)


 Jeremy C. Reed

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