On Fri, July 21, 2006 3:57 pm, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 02:44:30PM -0400, Ronald Vincent Vazquez wrote:
>>
>> Hello:
>>
>> Here is what we have done at our site. We re-mastered DSL (Damn Small
>> Linux) with all the tools we need (and some we won't ever need). The
>> bootable CD includes: ssh, netcat, etc., SCSI modules for our card, raid
>> stuff, and most important, Amanda client.
>>
>> As a test, we trashed the drives on the backup server rendering it
>> un-bootable and after the restoration a few minutes later the server was
>> running again. What I did was, boot from the CD, fdisk the drives,
>> create
>> the file systems, enable mirroring, mount the partitions, and restore
>> the
>> last level 0 to the drive. I didn't have to mess with any incrementals
>> because part of my test included a level 0 right before destroying the
>> server. The only other thing I did was to copy /dev from the CD to the
>> drive and mount /proc in order to install lilo on the hard drives.
>>
>> In short, if you could invest the time in creating a "Live CD" with
>> amanda
>> client now, it will pay good dividends later. You would need nothing
>> more
>> than the CD and a cup of coffee.
>>
>
> Great sounding system. Couple of questions if I might:
>
> 1. The resulting live CD, is it limited to the restoration of a single
> host, presumably the amanda server. And within that limit, if it
> exists, is the live CD in anyway tied to specific amanda configs?
>
> 2. Over the years/months, what sorts of things would necessitate a
> rebuild of the CD? Change of OS release? Update of any specific
> packages on the host? hardware changes? amanda config changes?
> amanda updates?
>
> 3. How scriptable might creating such a CD be? I'm thinking of two
> scenarios. An "automated" build would be useful if regular remakes
> of the CD were needed (question 2 above). And it would be a nice
> distributable script. Give instructions for how to get DSL and
> how to put together any of the extra pieces (netcat, etc.) into a
> form/location the script can use. Then setup a config file that
> says where the pieces are and anyother params needed.
>
> After they've done those steps, even neophytes of building a live CD,
> might be able to run the script and create a .iso to burn as their
> rescue/recovery disk.
>
> Thanks,
> jon
> --
> Jon H. LaBadie jon AT jgcomp DOT com
> JG Computing
> 4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159
> Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
>
Hello Jon:
1. Actually, the resulting CD is universal, we could restore any of our
x86 machines here. Our CD displays a prompt where you can choose form a
series of options: 1. Restore a cluster node, 2. Restore the backup server
itself (will drive the changer), 3. Restore any of our servers, 4. Obtain
a "bash" shell. All you do to restore any of the other servers is
configure your ethernet interface and ssh to the backup server or use
netcat.
2. The only reason I see which will force us to re-master the CD soon will
be to upgrade amanda itself from vers 2.4.X to 2.5.X. Other than that all
I can think is that you may want your "universal" CD to perform a new
task. In that case, another 20 cents and 5 minutes of your time... ;-)
3. The process of creating the disk can be turned into a script very
easily. For the software we add to the CD, we are compiling it on another
machine and then moving the binaries and libaries to the chrooted
environment manually.
Let me see if I have enough time this weekend to "cook" a document in
order to share our efforts.
RV
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Ronald Vincent Vazquez
Senior Unix Systems Administrator
Senior Network Manager
Christ Tabernacle Church Ministries
http://www.ctcministries.org
(301) 540-9394 Home
(240) 401-9192 Cell
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