make_tape_recovery using another tape drive

[kholikt]

I am running Ignite UX 3.25.

For make_tape_recovery it only support a local tape drive. Is that possible to do a make_tape_recovery to my Ignite ux tape drive instead of a local tape drive?

Although I can do a make_net_recovery and later on create the media I think this is very troublesome

[John Bolene]

I don't think I understand when you talk about an ignite-ux tape drive.
To use tape recovery, there has to be a physical tape drive plugged into the machine.
After any major change that I do not want to redo, I will do a tape backup using the command
make_recovery -vAC -d /dev/rmt/0m

This creates a tape with everything that I need to restore the machine. To restore, I just put the tape in the machine and reboot.
You need to stop the boot process and do a sea for the tape drive and then bo p3 or whatever path the tape drive is.

This will load the recovery tape and the server will resume just like it never had a problem.

We have around 250 C110 machines that look almost alike and have been having a disk failure about once a month (the machines are around 3 years old now).

If we do not have a backup of the particular machine that had the disk failure, we boot with a backup of another machine and change the machine name and IP (and a very few other machine specific parms associated with the application) after the machine comes back alive from loading the recovery tape and reboot again.

[Patrick Wallek]

You can not do a make_tape_recovery to a tape drive on a different machine. That tape drive that is used for a make_tape_recovery has to be locally attached to the machine you are backing up.

[Wodisch]

hello kholikt,
if you have a tape drive on your Ignite/UX server (is
that what you mean with "ignite tape"), why do you
not use "make_net_recovery" and store it over NFS
onto the server, then write that image-file to the tape
on the server?
HTH,
Wodisch

[Wayne Yu_1]

make_tape_recovery -d another-tape-drive does not work.

I have A180, the DLT tape drive is on the PCI bus on A4880A, I put a DDS2 on the internal SCSI bus.

system assigned DLT as /dev/rmt/0m and DDS2 as /dev/rmt/1m.

I tried to change the tape drive:
# make_tape_recovery -x inc_entire=vg00 -d /dev/rmt/1m
* Creating local directories for configuration files and archive.

======= 10/10/02 09:46:47 PDT Started make_tape_recovery. (Thu Oct 10
09:46:47 PDT 2002)
@(#) Ignite-UX Revision B.3.7.96
@(#) net_recovery (opt) $Revision: 10.575.1.1 $

* Testing pax for needed patch
* Passed pax tests.
* Checking Versions of Ignite-UX filesets
ERROR: Failed to open tape device /dev/rmt/0mn:Device busy (errno = 16).
ERROR: Check tape device failed.

======= 10/10/02 09:46:53 PDT make_tape_recovery completed unsuccessfully
#

Why it trys talk to dev/rmt/0mn? (I have a back going that drive) It should not even touch that drive, since it may have sensetive data does not want to be destroyed.

[Dan Vowell]

"make_recovery" used the "-d" flag to specify
destination tape drive (default=/dev/rmt/0mn).

"make_tape_recovery" changed several of the option flags (refer to man page). You must
now use "-a" to specify the archiving device file; in your case, /dev/rmt/1mn. Do not forget to use the "n" for "no rewind" since
Ignite/UX puts a LIF header at the beginning of the tape before it appends all the files.

The way you entered the command, Ignite/UX ignored the "-d" flag and picked the default tape drive (0mn) instead of what you wanted
(1mn).

Dan Vowell/ASE
Sr Technical Consultant
HP/FedEx Global Account
901-746-6735

[Steven E. Protter]

make_net_recovery is used to make a recovery archive on disk, usually and NFS mount on another machine.

In general, tape drives are not something that can be shared machine to machine.

For recovery, though you can boot off your built in lan card and recover off that disk.

All you need to get the image to tape is fbackup.

I've tried recoverying HP boxes of shareable, remote tape devices like surestore ultrium tapes. That's currently not supported.

So I guess I'd like to know what good the recovery tape made on a nother machine is going to be in recovering the source machine.

The better thing to do is upgrade to Ignite 4.1.62 and set up an Ignite image server. You can make_net_recovery all your system images there, and boot off the sucker, recovering systems without tape.

The only system you have to worry about tapes on is the image server. I'm doing that right now as a backup just in case I need to recovery a system and the tape drive suddenly fails at the same time.

SEP

[Jean-Louis Phelix]

Hi,

So you can't use a remote tape with make_net_recovery, but if you use make_net_recovery it's easy to build a boot tape from the network archive. The full procedure is documented in this interesting document :

/opt/ignite/share/doc/makenetrec.txt

Regards.