Need advice on restoring sever from restore files provided by host provider

Installing, Configuring, Troubleshooting server daemons such as Web and Mail
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washad
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Joined: 2017/04/21 15:40:37

Need advice on restoring sever from restore files provided by host provider

Post by washad » 2017/04/21 16:09:43

My scenario is this;

We have a CentOS5 Server hosted remotely (3rd party). This was set up before CPanel and before my time. Recently, the server had failed, We later learned that it was a bad sector in the drive and the OS wouldn't boot. Fortunately, we payed for automatic backups.

For these old systems - at least for our provider - backup / restore means that they provisioned a new server with CentOS5 installed, created a new folder called "_restore" can placed everything that was in root ('/') from the backup. I'm left with the task of getting the server up and running again. I don't know much about the system other than it served PHP files (Apache I assume), used MySQL, and had some python scripts.

I'm by no means a Linux expert - and what experience I do have is with Ubuntu derived system. However, my understanding of Linux is that, since there is no registry, the entire system should exist in the file system. Thus, I believe my task simply involves copying the correct folders from the '_restore' folder to the '/' folder.

My question(s) then are this;
1) Is my assumption correct, will copying the correct files essentially restore my system to working just as it did before, without the need to re-install Apache, MySql and recreate the MySql database?
2) What specific folders should I copy to make this work?
3) Is there anything that I am ignorant of that I should seek to understand?

Thank you.

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TrevorH
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Location: Brighton, UK

Re: Need advice on restoring sever from restore files provided by host provider

Post by TrevorH » 2017/04/22 13:12:48

3) Is there anything that I am ignorant of that I should seek to understand?
Apart from CentOS 5 being dead? You might want to take this opportunity to update the system to CentOS 7 and set it up there instead. It sounds like you need to do a fair amount of work to get back to where you were on CentOS 5 and that still leaves you on a dead operating system that will get steadily more and more out of date and less and less secure.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

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