Deep Freeze for RHEL

[drortrie]

Does anyone know about an appilcation like "deep freeze" for rhel?

Thanks.

[Rubberman]

Never used it, but basically it snapshots your system so changes can be easily rolled back, such as if a configuration change or software update cause problems.

In any case, Deep Freeze from Faronics is not open source - it is "shareware" and requires licensing for commercial use. Personally, I would not trust my Linux server system to a tool which gets so intimate with the operating system yet that I cannot analyze the source code for vulnerabilities.

[meton_magis]

Something you may look into is using LVM to make snapshots. Basically, you would create an LVM partition, and setup all the stuff on it how you want it to freeze.

Then, you create a snapshot, giving enough space to the snapshot partition to handle changes, and mount that as your partition. Then when you want to roll back, you delete the snapshot, and recreate it based on the original LVM partition. All changes are wiped out, and you're back to where you saved.

I used this trick with the root (had only root and /boot) partitions of virtual machines when I was practicing for my RHCE exam. I would do all the stuff I wanted to practice, then turn off the VM, delete the snapshot, recreate it, and restart the VM, and everything was back to my original config in about a minute.

I don't remember the commands off the top of my head, but google for "LVM snapshot" and you should get what you need.

[ramin.honary]

ZFS has snapshot/rollback features, and many other handy things including disk mirroring, hot swapping, and data compression.

I don't think the Linux kernel is able to be installed onto a ZFS partition, it must be installed onto ext3. But I have heard of plans to change this. So as long as your "/boot" partition is ext3, you can make everything else, like the partition for your "/home" and "/root" mount points could be made ZFS and you can enable snapshots on those.

I've never done this, so please don't just take my word for it and do some more research, but ZFS is definitely an excellent place to start looking for a solution to your problem, and it is open-source.

[meton_magis]

ZFS has snapshot/rollback features, and many other handy things including disk mirroring, hot swapping, and data compression.

I don't think the Linux kernel is able to be installed onto a ZFS partition, it must be installed onto ext3. But I have heard of plans to change this. So as long as your "/boot" partition is ext3, you can make everything else, like the partition for your "/home" and "/root" mount points could be made ZFS and you can enable snapshots on those.

I've never done this, so please don't just take my word for it and do some more research, but ZFS is definitely an excellent place to start looking for a solution to your problem, and it is open-source.

The problem with ZFS, is that while it is "Open Source" it is through the Sun License, which is incompatible with the GPL, which the Kernel uses.

ZFS is not able to be mounted via kernel module, only by FUSE (filesystem is user space,) and it is noted as being very buggy. I would not suggest this method until either they improve ZFS (looking more and more unlikely, since Oracle isn't known to play well with the Free software community,) or until BtrFS (linux's native response to the ZFS stuff,) is marked as stable, and go with it.

[seacliff]

If you're that fond on Deep Freeze, they have a version for linux as well.

Search for DeepFreezeLinux.