Restoring a System from Your Home-Grown Encrypted Timecapsule Backup

the background

At home, our Mac laptops back up using Time Machine to a CentOS box running Netatalk (offering AFP service). This was set up more or less according to someone else's excellent blog post on the subject, with the principal difference being that the backups end up on an encrypted, Mac-formatted Disk Image (.dmg file) within the AFP share. (I'll post the link to that once I either find the directions again or write it up myself.) Because of this, a complete system restore from this rig takes a little extra moxie, which I've documented here:

the starting premises

OS media 10.6.0
target system was running 10.5.8
"Timecapsule" backups to encrypted sparsebundles sitting on a local AFP server

the bullet list

(install replacement HD, if applicable)
boot from OS media
from the installer's Utilities menu, launch Disk Utility
partition/initialize target disk
quit Disk Utility
from the installer's Utilities menu, launch Terminal
verify network connectivity to your AFP server (ifconfig, ping, etc.)
mount the AFP share containing the encrypted sparsebundle (see the command-line fu, below)
unlock the encrypted sparsebundle (see the command-line fu, below)
quit Terminal
from the installer's Utilities menu, select Restore from Backup
follow the prompts; it should present your mounted disk image as a valid Time Machine source, and your newly-formatted target disk as a valid target volume

the command-line fu

# to mount the AFP share containing the encrypted sparsebundle: mkdir /Volumes/timecapsule mount -t afp afp://user:password@w.x.y.z/whatever /Volumes/timecapsule # (where "w.x.y.z/whatever" is the IP address of your AFP host and the share name) # to unlock and mount the encrypted sparsebundle: hdiutil mount -readonly /Volumes/timecapsule/path/to/sparsebundle/directory/