Cooking System Configs
Here’s how my day goes. I sit down at my computer, and if I’m not working I’m dragged back into config land. I’ve got years of experience messing around with configurations at this point, and I want to share how not to do things.
Burnt
Nothing beats the rush of changing files that your computer needs to work. Grub and fstab(file system tab) are some of the files I would touch on a weekly basis to try to make my computer run the way I want it to run. Some of you might already see what goes wrong: Computer works fine, then I reboot, and now the bios can’t find the OS anymore. Best of all, I didn’t keep any kind of backup ;). This was frustrating at the time, I have since learned how to avoid this kind of issue. (It’s backups and always will be)
Toasted
After a year or so of changing files manually in nano, I grow up a little and start to backup the files I change before rebooting so in the worst case scenario, I could boot up an install USB, gain access to the os and swap out the problem file with it’s backup. This experience is terrible compared to my current solution.
Edible
After some more months of editing configs, I’m realizing I can use other text editors than nano, get some syntax highlighting for configs that use standards like, json and yaml. Or for files that made their own standards like dockerfile but are also popular enough to get IDE support. If you are editing your system critical files manually. I recommend using your favorite IDE you use for other coding tasks and sudo cp file_system_uses file_system_uses.bak, then sudo cp file_you_edit file_system_uses.
Tasty
As some people might have realized by now, what if I forget to make a .bak? Some more time passes and I also started using distros with backups selectable at boot. This makes me far less anxious about changing most configs. Still worried when changing settings in grub/Systemd-boot. Now what if I told you that making .baks isn’t the best idea ever? And what if I told you that you can use git as a backup?
Delicious
There are special kinds of git repos that you can use for managing files in different folders. I don’t use those, I write a bash script that copy the files from my git repo into the right spots on my system.
I also started using NixOS, which is perfect for making sure my configurations do what I expect. My workflow is more about editing my one NixOS repo to configure my configs. It’s nifty when editing configs that are more complex than helpful because NixOS has a lot of great defaults you can toggle.
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