Hi,

On Sat, 24 Jul 2010, John Drescher wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 4:10 PM, Mister IT Guru <misteritguru AT gmx DOT com> 
> wrote:
> >>> What would be a method of restoring a remote linux based server to it
> >>> last full backup, (or even it's first!). Is such a move possible?
> >
> > I was thinking of a general approach, one that can be run on any linux
> > box - my end result would be something like, run a restore job on the
> > target client, and have it reboot, and it's now how it was when I took
> > it's first backup. It seems a full environment may be needed.
> 
> A custom livecd with bacula on it and some predefined setup should go
> pretty far on this.

You could probably do something quite nice with PXE booting either.

If you are familiar with the LTSP, Clonezilla and (in particular) FOG
projects, they do similar things in certain respects.  FOG is a
network-based cloning solution.  You:

1. Set all of your desktops to PXE boot.  
2. Set up your DHCP server to point PXE clients at your FOG server.  
3. On boot, the FOG server then gets to decide whether each client boots
   the local hard disk as usual, or goes into some other mode such as
   uploading an image of itself to the server or downloading a new image to
   its hard disk (either unicast or multicast).

You control FOG itself using a web interface, though that's not necessarily
a requirement.

It seems plausible that you could have a similar PXE set up with a "bacula
restore" mode.  Most of the time the server just boots as normal, unless
you tell the PXE boot server that this particular computer should go into
Bacula restore mode.  It then boots a small linux OS which includes
bacula-fd and perhaps bconsole.  

A script could then format the partitions, trigger a full restore, set up
grub and reboot onto the restored image.

I'm not saying this would be a small piece of work, but a fair bit of it
could probably be lifted from FOG.  Generalising the detailed restore
process across all of your servers might be difficult and across servers in
general might be really tough. You have to deal with issues like which
partitions exist, which should be formatted/wiped, setting up software RAID
partitions, etc.  The "generalised bare metal restore" conversation has
come here before.

Gavin


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