An old undocumented server took a dump over the weekend; the hard drive corrupted some blocks containing essential binary system files. Luckily, I was able to use a live CD to recover the /etc and /home directories. I don't believe there was anything in /var, but I'm not sure at this point.

This box had two purposes:

1. To act as a file share redirector from the general network to an isolated subnet via SAMBA.

2. To provide a Squid cache server to the isolated subnet so that the people internal to that subnet can visit authorized websites without giving them access to the entire internet.

The box was some flavor of Red Hat Fedora Core, no idea which version. The individual who created the box has left our service some time ago, and refuses to answer any calls that we leave him, for reasons I won't air here. I will say that he had a habit of doing whatever he wanted without regards to any kind of central policy, and refusing to document what he had done. I inherited his mess when he left, and I've been deciphering it ever since.

I've started work on reimplementing his work in a VMWare instance running Ubuntu 6.06LTS. This is not a long-term solution; we are slowly removing his old hacks and reintegrating his departments into the network at large. However, the file shares are critical to the continued operation of the department.

So far, I have managed to get the network shares remapped and reconnected to the box, but I have yet to share them out via Samba. I have not attempted reconfiguring Squid. Ideally, I would like to just pluck the Samba and Squid configuration files out of /backup/etc and drop them into the appropriate directories in /etc, but I'm not sure how well that would work, or if there are significant differences between the way Red Hat and Ubuntu would handle those files.

One of the reasons I'd prefer to do it this way is that I'd like to salvage the Samba password files and not have to touch the 50+ computers in the area to remap all the Samba shares.

Suggestions? I'm open to switching to Fedora if there is some magical way to make everything work by restoring certain directories. I was mainly sticking with Ubuntu because I actually know Ubuntu's quirks, sort of.