Protecting the OS of a Hardened Repository

[vipthomps]

With the increase of hardened repos what is the general consensus on backing up the OS for them? Just use a Veeam Agent for Linux on it?

[Gostev]

But why? These are usually extremely naked servers. What specifically do you want to back up from a hardened repo server? There's usually no point to backup the OS itself, as redeploying it will be faster than restoring.

[vipthomps]

That's what I'm trying to science out how impactful it would be to reinstall the OS (Ubuntu 20.04 in this case) and reconfigure accounts and permissions to a significant amount of backup jobs and SoBRs. I'm thinking more along the lines of a kernel update goes sideways or if the raid controller goes bad.

[Mildur]

or if the raid controller goes bad.

Backup Copy Jobs or SOBR with capacity tier for the backup data to the rescue

The OS itself will not be a real issue to install again. Max 30 Minutes until it runs on new or the same disk.
The user and sudo permissions are created in a few minutes.

[aj_potc]

While it's true that a reinstallation won't take long, I'd suggest using a configuration management tool to set up the repository system for you.

I've had great success with Ansible, and I use it to do the initial configuration of all my Linux systems. It's great for things like installing specific packages, setting up user accounts, configuring the firewall, setting up automatic updates, and doing other basic setup tasks that you'd typically do only once.

Whether this is useful or not depends on how frequently you use it, but for me it's a great tool to ensure all of my systems are set up consistently from the start.

[vipthomps]

Thank you for the responses!