I'm trying to set up a Linux development environment so I can safely make changes to my website without breaking the live site.

Linode hosts my live site. A simple solution would be to host my development server on Linode as well, but I want to avoid doubling my hosting costs.

The cheapest way I see is to use Vagrant on my Windows workstation to host my development environment.

After I attempt to restore the backup to Vagrant and reboot the VM, I can no longer ssh into the Vagrant host.

It's probably because by restoring the backup I overwrite some special Vagrant configuration, but I'm not sure how to avoid that.

How do I make this approach work? If my approach is fundamentally wrong, can you suggest an alternative?

Creating the backup

On the Linode I used these commands to create a compressed copy of the entire filesystem, while ignoring things that shouldn't be included in the backup:

$ sudo rsync -ahvz --exclude={/dev/*,/proc/*,/sys/*,/tmp/*,/run/*,/mnt/*,/backup/*} /* /backup/2
$ sudo tar -czf /backup/2.gz /backup/2

The backup file is called 2.gz because this is thesecond backup. The first backup is called 1.gz.

I use WinSCP to copy the backup file to my Windows workstation.

Setting up the Vagrant host

I need a Vagrant box that matches my Linode operating system (Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS, kernel 3.9.3). I selected the closet match from vagrantbox.es:

Ubuntu Server Precise 12.04.3 amd64
Kernel is ready for Docker (Docker not included)

On my workstation I ran these commands to add the box and initialize and boot an instance:

$ vagrant box add ubuntu-precise http://nitron-vagrant.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/vagrant_ubuntu_12.04.3_amd64_virtualbox.box
$ mkdir linode-test
$ cd linode-test
$ vagrant init ubuntu-precise
$ vagrant up

Now Vagrant is running a machine with SSH on port 2222.

The operating system version is the same. The kernel version is 3.8.0. Sounds close enough.

Restoring the backup

With WinSCP I copied the backup file 2.gz to /home/vagrant/2.gz on the Vagrant box.

With PuTTY I connected via ssh to my new Vagrant box:

On the box move the backup to the filesystem root.

$ sudo mv 2.gz /

Extract the archive to the filesystem root:

$ sudo tar -xvpz -f 2.gz -C / --strip-components=2

(I discovered I need to use strip components because all files in the archive have the prefix backup/2/. I'll fix this for the next backup.)

After the tar command completes, I log out of the box.

Testing the backup

When I try to log in again, it doesn't let me log in as vagrant with a password any more.

It does let me log in as iain, my user on the live Linode, with a password. That surprised me because I disabled password authentication on my live Linode. I figured that I have to restart the ssh service for the change to take effect.

Instead of restarting just ssh, I chose to restart the whole system.

Now I can't even get to the login screen. PuTTY says "connection refused" when I try to connect.

What went wrong?