— 2 min read

I have several servers powering syslog including it’s Raspberry Pi mirror, load balancer and email servers. All of my servers are hosted using Linode in their London data centre and have Linode’s back-up system doing both daily and weekly snapshots.

For the app and database servers I do server-side backups storing each website and it’s database in it’s own folder within /backup in case I require a quick back-up to fix something, rather than the server has died.

This is all well and good but I like having an off-site backup too and for that I use S3…

About S3

Amazon’s S3 is pretty cheap and very easy to use. Because only data is going in you don’t pay a transfer fee and the cost of storage is very affordable, you can see a pricing list here.

To do the backup I use a …

 — < 1 min read

Sometimes you want to be able to install packages on another machine without the hassle of a long apt-get install command or having to write down every single package you’ve installed.

Luckily Debian has the wonderful dpkg which has 2 methods for generating a list of installed packages and another for importing a list.

Generating a list of installed packages

sudo dpkg --get-selections > selections

This will generate a file called selections which will contain something like

... snip ...
adduser install
apache2 install
apache2-mpm-prefork install
apache2-utils install
apache2.2-bin install
apache2.2-common install
apt install
... snip...

This is just a simple, plain text file so can be copied between servers.

Installing packages from an exported list

This is almost just as easy, first we need to actually set the list of selected packages

sudo dpkg --set-selections < selections

Then we need to actually do an update and install

sudo apt-get update && sudo …