# Revert to fresh install over ssh?



## cmanns (Dec 16, 2008)

Well I'm still pretty new to freebsd as told in ##freebsd on freenode, and from a friend. Theres a few ways to make my system like new.

Little background - tried to make webserver, couldn't get one control panel to work so I thought hell with it I'll try Cpanel since I already use it and it'd be a simple migration over if it worked.

Well it didn't, I'm running 7.1, not sure why it's not working but everythings broken and nothing fix's it. Anyways I hate cpanel, it's bulky, slow, and my clients don't use 95% of it's features.

I found out the panel I wanted to use with freebsd works fine, I shouldn't of installed it manually :stud I got it working on my 7.1 desktop, yay. 

Anyways the server is all gunked up and cpanel install took near a half hour, imagin how much stuff it changed in the OS and such 

So if anybody has a painless idea to get a like new system without sending my colo guy on a hour drive which he wont do for a few days anyways, leme know, greatly appreciated 

I'm going to try to tinker around and get things like apache to work in the meantime but I'd really like to get this new panel on it works flawlessly :e

*Edit: Reason I'm asking this is I'd need a sort of walk-through which my friend couldn't give me, would suck killing my server and having to wait a few days to get it back online >_>*


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## SirDice (Dec 16, 2008)

cmanns said:
			
		

> Anyways the server is all gunked up and cpanel install took near a half hour, imagin how much stuff it changed in the OS and such


It shouldn't. Ports never touch anything that's part of the base OS.

Have a look in /var/db/pkg/ you can find the names and versions of the ports/packages you've installed. Use pkg_delete to remove them.

That should at least give you a clean OS again.


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## graudeejs (Dec 16, 2008)

Why did yo use 7.1 (yet unreleased version, only RC) for production server.
For production server you should have used 7.0, well, that's what I would do.

your system probably ain't messed up. Why do you think it messed? Just because it took while to compile port doesn't mean it was modifying system.


Anyway to rebuild system, you can use csup to update source files and rebuild system.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld.html
you don't need to restart pc into single user mode as it's suggested (it's just recommended, but can be done in multiuser system) , just turn of as many daemons as you can.

however i suggest you do this on emulator before doing on production server, just to make sure you understand what will happen, and what to expect.

Use with caution


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## cmanns (Dec 16, 2008)

CPanel doesn't have a port, cpanel's basically a system virus hehe. It deleted my ports tree n such and installed all of its own stuff.

I'm using 7.1 since I've used 8.0 before stable, I need 7.1 for some drivers and my colo guy don't know how to get the driver in 7.0, too poor to fly there lol.

thanks for that killassmurf I'll see if I can get that to work.


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## graudeejs (Dec 16, 2008)

hmm, in this case, it might now work that well.

BUT, do you have more than one disk on server with free space that can be portioned, in this case you can do fresh install via internet 


http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?t=1538
This article describes how to install FreeBSD without disk

this can be used to install FreeBSD over net
however this can be tricky


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## danger@ (Dec 16, 2008)

You may find my article useful, but note that it isn't targeted at new and unexperienced users. However you may want to try it on your own computer and then if you are brave enough on the server at colo 

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/remote-install/index.html


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## cmanns (Dec 16, 2008)

danger@ said:
			
		

> You may find my article useful, but note that it isn't targeted at new and unexperienced users. However you may want to try it on your own computer and then if you are brave enough on the server at colo
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/remote-install/index.html



Ohh thank you this may come in handy in the future. I got the system cleaned pretty much by overwriting the system files instead of reformatting. I got two of the same drives since the raid doesnt work, if I ever have a issue again I could install on the 2ndary drive 

ty - bookmarked it.


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## CyberCr33p (Dec 23, 2008)

danger your tutorial works only if the datacenter provides linux distro that works from RAM. This is because you can't run on a live system this command:


```
dd if=/root/disk.img of=/dev/sda bs=1m
```


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