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?
