On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 12:29:17PM -0500, Kevin M. Myer wrote:
> A number of commercial backup vendors ship bootable CDs with a copy of their
> backup application installed.  You can use these CDs to restore a system that
> was totally toasted, due to massive disk failure, being hacked, etc.  I'm
> wondering if anyone has ever developed something similar for AMANDA.

One of my colleagues has built a bootable rescue CD based on the Knoppix
Gnu/Linux distribution (see www.knoppix.net if you don't know Knoppix).
His CD includes an amanda client besides our usual tools and goodies. I
have just recently used this CD to clone two of our machines, testing
the disaster recovery in case of a complate hard disk failure.

Steps are:

- booting from the rescue CD
- setting up networking and starting sshd to be able to work comfortably
  from my workstation ;-)
- partitioning the hard disk, setting up swap, creating file systems
- mounting the root partition somewhere like /mnt/target
- recovering the root partition using amrecover via the network
- mounting the remaining partitions into the recovered root partition's
  mount points
- recovering the remaining partitions
- setting up tmp on the target partition (since /tmp is normally
  excluded from our backups), giving it the correct permissions
- chrooting into /mnt/target and making the system bootable (quite easy
  with grub)
- rebooting and testing the system.

Works great if the new machine is identical to the old one. In my case,
I ran into a (small) problem because the clone machines were only
Pentium I while the original machine's kernel was built for Pentium II
and higher. However, since Knoppix (and thus my colleagues's rescue CD)
are based on Debian, "apt-get install"-ing an appropriate kernel wasn't
very hard :-)

The most tedious part of this procedure was changing the tapes (only a
single DLT drive here). I should really take a look at the file: driver
some time...

Bye,
Martin
-- 
Martin.Schwarz AT toplink-plannet DOT de                   toplink-plannet GmbH
Network Operations Engineer                            Schönfeldstraße 8
Tel +49 [0] 721 6636-0                                 D-76131 Karlsruhe
Fax +49 [0] 721 6636-199                  http://www.toplink-plannet.de/