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Comment by wryun | Hacker News Reader

On most openwrt devices you can compare /rom/etc/config to /etc/config (though this will get you a bunch of automatic changes as well).

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Tracking config via VCS is great, but the automatic changes is what then makes it tricky to understand what you've actually configured.

I had a look more into this. https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/114kv0y/weeding_ou... has some people with the problem that I'm trying to avoid.

I see the fresh re-install suggestions probably work but that's tedious and risky.

GP missed this basic fact and then moved to NixOS for a router target? What!?

I use NixOS, btw

Is nixos new arch?

For sure. I feel like the arch joke has played itself out.

I use arch, btw.

As an Arch user I've always been a bit confused by the joke. I have more shit go wrong on my Macbook. Sure, on Arch I might get a bad Nvidia driver update and either have to roll back the driver, kernel, or both[0] but these are at least easily fixable. You can easily determine the problem, fix it, and you've learned how to avoid it or resolve it in 5 minutes if it happens again (thanks Nvidia ;). Other than that, the only breaking things are when I'm fucking around, and well... that seems like my own damn fault lol. But several Macbooks I've had will go to sleep and if I try too fast to wake it up I'll have a black screen that can't be recovered until I reboot. And I could go on about how weird and infuriating some shit is and how I can't even implement a fix myself and I just give up because I don't want to waste time fighting Apple and play that cat and mouse game with no good documentation. I've just come to understand that "just works" means "not as buggy as Winblows".

[0] https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/only-black-screen-after-logi...

AFAIAA the joke comes from Arch's purported superiority (rolling release, close to upstream, bleeding edge, KISS) as compared to "bloated/slow" e.g. Ubuntu. It's kinda old now and existed even before the controversial switch to systemd from SysVinit/rc.conf.

Tbh I thought that it was because people are scared of the terminal, this even somehow includes people who have used Linux for a decade. That and that basically you're forced to use the terminal for Arch and read the instructions.

So kinda like how people joke about Ikea furniture being difficult to build. I mean... it's not, it's quite intuitive. But even if it wasn't then it's purely an exercise in ability to read instructions

Isn't arch just linux for people who can't install gentoo?

Gentoo is old arch.

Isn't Arch just Gentoo for people who think 90% of the time the provided build instructions are sufficient.

Does it run doom? Debian?

He was missing a config to compare to previous versions so it makes sense from that perspective.

Could always add a git repo to track changes to config files if you need the full history.

On virtual routers there is no content in /rom. What you can easily do is install another copy of the same image on another VM or container and run it through firstboot. Make a backup and compare it with a backup from your running system. Even better is to make a backup just after firstboot, then use the system and compare your current backup with the first one.

Do keep in mind that the OpenWRT backup does not contain information about which extra packages were installed after firstboot. I solved this adding a cron job which runs opkg list-installed > /etc/opkg_installed.txt and adding that last filepath to /etc/sysupgrade.conf so it gets added to backups.

If you have an overlay, you can do something like this to list user-installed packages only:

    ls /overlay/upper/usr/lib/opkg/info/*.list | sed -e 's/.*\///' | sed -e 's/\.list//'

There is no overlay on ext4-based virtual routers.

    # mount|grep ext4
    /dev/mapper/pve-vm--501--disk--0 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,stripe=512)

The /overlay directory exists just like the /rom one does but they're empty:

    # ls -l /|grep -E 'overlay|rom' 
    drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root          1024 Jan 27 23:53 overlay
    drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root          1024 Jan 27 23:53 rom

These are empty directories (there is a note file in /rom with some info for those using squashfs which is not applicable to these installations).

That's not complete, though, is it? Ex. if I follow https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/wifiextende... most of the config is covered, but not the parts that disable daemons.

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