Arch Linux

raihan

Member

Registered: 2023-01-31

Posts: 18

Know the system

can it possible to know what are the changes i made after installing the system.

suppose i have  start/enabled some systemd service , installed some package . I have configured the network system . So i want to know the change that i made.

schard

Forum Moderator

From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 2,658

Website

Re: Know the system

If you don't have some kind of image of the unchanged original, your only possibility is to rely on the dates such as mtime and ctime, but this is not reliable in all situations.
Somehow, this sounds like an x/y problem. What do you actually want to achieve here?

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dogknowsnx

Guest

Re: Know the system

You could also check your shell's history for the commands you've entered...

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,480

Website

Re: Know the system

I agree this really sounds like an X-Y problem, and there is no single unified answer - but there are ways to gather various information relevant to the apparent question:

Any enabled services will have symbolic links created under /etc/systemd/ (or ~/.config/systemd/ for user services).  Any that were started but not enabled aren't really relevant as that's not a lasting change ... but you could use systemctl to list which services are running.

Packages that you've installed are easily listed by pacman especially now that base is a meta-package: pacman -Qeq will list all explicitly installed packages, and everything other that "base" and any other package you installed via pacstrap will be those you installed after installation.  If you don't know what you installed with the initial pacstrap command, it is stored at the very beginning of /var/log/pacman.log.

Any configuration you made to your networking is ... well, in your network configs!  The path to these files will differ based on which networking service(s) you are using, but these are all listed in the relevant wiki pages.  For me it's just enabling one dhcpcd hook and my wpa_supplicant.conf file.

I'd speculate that your end goals (the X to these Ys) is either that you want to clone your current system, or you want to have a script to deploy very similar / identical systems.  Is one of these your true goal?  If so, which one?  If not, what then?

Last edited by Trilby (2023-12-31 15:44:46)

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

raihan

Member

Registered: 2023-01-31

Posts: 18

Re: Know the system

I agree this really sounds like an X-Y problem, and there is no single unified answer - but there are ways to gather various information relevant to the apparent question:

Any enabled services will have symbolic links created under /etc/systemd/ (or ~/.config/systemd/ for user services).  Any that were started but not enabled aren't really relevant as that's not a lasting change ... but you could use systemctl to list which services are running.

Packages that you've installed are easily listed by pacman especially now that base is a meta-package: pacman -Qeq will list all explicitly installed packages, and everything other that "base" and any other package you installed via pacstrap will be those you installed after installation.  If you don't know what you installed with the initial pacstrap command, it is stored at the very beginning of /var/log/pacman.log.

Any configuration you made to your networking is ... well, in your network configs!  The path to these files will differ based on which networking service(s) you are using, but these are all listed in the relevant wiki pages.  For me it's just enabling one dhcpcd hook and my wpa_supplicant.conf file.

I'd speculate that your end goals (the X to these Ys) is either that you want to clone your current system, or you want to have a script to deploy very similar / identical systems.  Is one of these your true goal?  If so, which one?  If not, what then?

Though I coudn't manage to write what i want to do but you have get my point . Basically i want to clone my system . Or in my word i want to copy my system setup in any mechine when i want . May be it is called full system backup . So I want my full settings or system config backup . Or the latest state of my mechine will be prepared to be cloned to other one may be in a vm. I have read the wiki about full system backup with rsync and tor but didn't understand enough .

dnim

Member

Registered: 2023-05-31

Posts: 8

Re: Know the system

Obligatory wiki link: Synchronization and backup programs

You could use timeshift to maintain system snapshots.