local tape drive is bad, backup on another machine?

[f. halili]

i have one a machine with a bad dds3 tape drive. this will be replaced but i want to backup ( via ignite "make_tape_recovery" ) to another machine that is connected to the network and has a working tape drive. Is that possible? How will I do that ?? Thanks.

[Steven E. Protter]

The base OS is not equipped to do that.

We have a third party product from Veritas that makes tape drives available to other machines and can do that. There are possible problems using tapes produced this way.

Sorry.

SEP

[f. halili]

waht are good practices so i can still make a backup before the tape drive is replaced ??

[Peter Godron]

Hi,
I don't think you can make a recovery tape on a foreign machine. You can however use a foreign tape to back up data, if you NFS mount disks.

[Victor Fridyev]

Hi,
AFAIK, you can't use a tape connected to another machine in order to create make_recovery tape, but you can build a Ignite server on another machine and create ignite images there. If you have enough space, the images may be stored there, if not, copy them onto a tape.

HTH

[Ranjith_5 · Accepted solution]

Dear halili,

Use #make_net_recovery to achieve this.

The make_net_recovery tool creates a system recovery archive and stores the archive on the network. The archive created by make_net_recovery is specific to the system it was created for and its identity includes hostname, ip_address, networking information, etc.In the event of a root disk failure, the recovery archive can be installed via Ignite-UX to restore the system.

To create a system recovery archive that includes files from all file systems in the vg00 volume group use:

#make_net_recovery -s -x inc_entire=vg00

run the command in the GUI mode for more friendly environment.

See man page for a detailed commandline options.

Hope this helps.

regards,
Syam

[Steven E. Protter]

make_net_recovery is a good practice whether or not the tape drive is working.

It creates a specific archive on another machine that the machine that makes the archive can boot read off of.

You need to have a network hub or switch based on the built in LAN cards. Then you boot off that network to an Ignite server configured to host the images.

We do both make_tape_recovery and make_net_recovery on all servers.

SEP