fbackup & make_recovery - 2 questions

[Deepak Seth_1]

Hi Admin,

This is such a great forum that i can't stop my self from posting 2 questions in one message - pls. apologise.

Part I

I have to take a backup using "fbackup" of around 55 gig. My database is on HPUX system and DLT tape drive on SUN system. Is it possible ? ONly using fbackup !! . Iam aware of "dd" and "tar" way of taking the backup for the above .

Part II

Is it possible to burn a CD for the make recovery tapes and then use them to boot a system . Problem is that all my new servers have no tape drives and they don't have a Single controller for me to use my external tape drive. Any suggestions (minus buying new tape drive as they cost very -very less) .

thanx in advance.

[harry d brown jr]

I hope your network is fast and can take the load.

fbackup can do a remote backup.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

HI Deepak:

I'll answer the first one: No, that dog won't hunt. Fbackup/frestore is an HP only non-standard utility. Though it is not free, OmniBack does work well and supports a media agent on Sun. Otherwise, you are back to using remsh's, tar's, and compresses.

Clay

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

To answer your questions:

1) Yes you can use a remote tape device with fbackup. The syntax is fbackup -f machine:device. You must have rem??? command capability to the remote host with the tape drive as root. Have a look at the man page for fbackup and look at the -f option.

2) Here the URL to a question in the Ignite/UX FAQ on HPs site that talks about creating a CD from an image of your machine:
http://software.hp.com/products/IUX/faq.html#create-media

[Mark Vollmers]

Hi-

Try taking a look at this (Ignite custom media info):

http://software.hp.com/products/IUX/docs/Customized_Install_Media_Paper.pdf

It might answer any questions about actually making it work.

Mark

[Sachin Patel]

Hi Deepak,
1. Yes. fbackup -f sun:/dev/.... to do fbackup to remote tape drive. In order to do this you need to have permission to do remsh as root to that sun system.

2. Yes. I don't know how. but in this forum someone has ask this question before search for it. My search is not working

Sachin

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Deepak,

1. You should be able to take backup on the remote system provided you have .rhosts entry for root home directory on the SUN system. Means you should be able to rlogin to the SUN box from here as root. You can atleast give a try.

2. I am not sure if make_recovery works on a CD-RW.This is because it is RANDOMaccess media and make_recovery may not be yet capable of preparing CD-RWs.

-Sri

[Bernie Vande Griend]

Just an additional thought to #1.
If you're going to backup 55Gb between 2 servers, I'd suggest having a backup network, that is, a separate network connection between the two which hopefully can run at 100MB full duplex or Gigabit and also therefore won't interfere with other network activity.
If you have multiple servers doing this, then they can share this "network".

[Deepak Seth_1]

What a wonderful forum . I get few answer at a lightening speed .

Thanx everybody for useful suggestions and giving me good pointers for fbackup and make recovery tape .

[Michael Tully]

Hi I don't believe that you run 'fbackup' across to a Sun server, however I don't have one test. 'fbackup' is a proprietry backup solution that was designed to run on HP-UX systems only. I wouldn't think that you will able to get the 'frecover' (restoring files) to work. FOr question 2, yes you can burn CD's into a bootable form. Have a look at the link below, and Chapter 10.

http://www.docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/B2355-90704/B2355-90704.html

HTH
-Michael