[Beowulf] Fwd: removing X

[Tim Cutts]

On 8 Feb 2009, at 6:41 pm, Reuti wrote:

> Am 04.02.2009 um 20:00 schrieb Francesco Pietra:
>
>> How to purge remove cleanly a damaged X server from a working station
>> running on debian lenny amd64?
>>
>> Failure of one (or two) slot(s) of  kingston 400 DDR1 ECC on the
>> multisocket workstation prevents running startx, presumably by
>> corrupting files related to X. My work around did not resolve the
>> issue. Therefore, I would like to remove completely the X server
>> without leaving broken packages (using aptitude?). This would be the
>> first step to reinstall X. I rarely use X, except to check the
>> molecular structure for certain input files to molecular mechanics
>> software. In this case X is important, not to go on blindly.
>>
>> I have been advised to carry out a fresh install of linux.
>
> I second this. Fixing all the broken files might take more time, as  
> you can't be sure what was really affected.
>
>> I would
>> like to avoid that because of so many compilations to carry out.
>
> Having a working backup would make this an issue of a few minutes.  
> You don't have any?


Quite.

In our case, all locally built software is in a separate tree, so  
reinstalling a machine is almost never a problem; the locally built  
software is either out on a backed-up NFS server, or its in a specific  
directory separate from the OS distribution, which can easily be  
backed up and restored.  The configuration information is [almost] all  
handled by cfengine, so in most cases nothing needs to be backed up on  
the compute nodes at all, and rebuilding them is just a matter of PXE  
booting them, hands-off.

Tim



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