Easy way to reinstall fedora machine

So at work we got in a new machine to act as our repository server. However in the haste to get the machine up-and-running I made the school boy error of configuring the raid as RAID 0 instead of RAID 1. As the machine is now configured correctly I wanted an easy way to reinstall the machine with the same settings. Here are the steps that I used to reinstall the machine.

1 Install etckeeper


yum install etckeeper etckeeper-bzr


2 Configure etckeeper to use bzr


vi /etc/etckeeper/etckeeper.conf

# The VCS to use.
# VCS="hg"
#VCS="git"
VCS="bzr"
# VCS="darcs"

# Options passed to git commit when run by etckeeper.
#GIT_COMMIT_OPTIONS=""

# Options passed to hg commit when run by etckeeper.
#HG_COMMIT_OPTIONS=""

# Options passed to bzr commit when run by etckeeper.
#BZR_COMMIT_OPTIONS=""

# Options passed to darcs commit when run by etckeeper.
#DARCS_COMMIT_OPTIONS=""

# Uncomment to avoid etckeeper committing existing changes
# to /etc automatically once per day.
#AVOID_DAILY_AUTOCOMMITS=1

# Uncomment to avoid etckeeper committing existing changes to
# /etc before installation. It will cancel the installation,
# so you can commit the changes by hand.
#AVOID_COMMIT_BEFORE_INSTALL=1

# The high-level package manager that's being used.
# (apt, pacman-g2, yum etc)
HIGHLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER=yum

# The low-level package manager that's being used.
# (dpkg, rpm, pacman-g2, etc)
LOWLEVEL_PACKAGE_MANAGER=rpm

3 Initialize etckeeper


etckeeper init


4 Push your etckeeper to a save location


bzr push sftp://server/source/etckeeper
bzr bind sftp://server/source/etckeeper


X Create the list of packages


rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME}\n" | sort > installed_rpm_list.txt


X Reinstall fedora

Reinstall fedora.

Reload Packages

Copy the install_rpm_list.txt back to your home directory and reinstall the packages using

yum install $(cat installed_rpm_list.txt)


Useful Links

• http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=237481