Copy an Ignite Image Tape to Another one

[Tamer Shaalan]

Dear Guys,

I have an hp-ux 11.11 box with two tapes : the first is a very fast Tape (HP Ultrium 230)with huge storage capacity, and the other is normal DDS3 (DAT 24) tape. I have an ignite backup of the machine on a 24 GB tape made with DDS drive. I try to extract from this tape, but the process is too slow. Is it possible to COPY this ignite image from DDS tape to the ultruim one and then extract files quickly from the ultrium (I know that, read and write processes on DDS tapes are much more faster than search process). Waiting from you !!!!!!!

All replies will be highly appreciated.

Tamer.

[Pete Randall]

Ignite provides the copy_boot_tape command to replicate a make_tape_recovery boot tape. Do a man on "copy_boot_tape".


Pete

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Tamer,

You have to temporarily stage the image on the system before you can copy it to the ultrium. The tape consists of two parts. LIF area and the OS archive. You will have to extract both of them seperately onto a filesystem.

dd if=/dev/rmt/0mn of=/filesystem/lif bs=2k
dd if=/dev/rmt/0mn of=/filesystem/osarchive bs=1024k

Do the same thing changing the if and of arguments.

dd if=/filesystem/lif of=/dev/rmt/1mn bs=2k
dd if=/filesystem/osarchive of=/dev/rmt/1mn bs=1024k

Personally, I don't like to extract from the ignite tape other than to recover the whole system. You can create 'fbackup' tape periodically if you need to restore any files. That will be a lot faster than ignite.

-Sri

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Geez.. I don't know what I was thinking. You can ignore my previous post as Pete gave you the easiest way, unless you are not aware of the structure of make_tape_recovery tape.

-Sri

[Pete Randall]

Wow! I think that's the first time I've ever seen Sri have a brain cramp!! he normally never misses.

;^)


Pete

[Tamer Shaalan]

Thanks a lot Pete , Sri

the two posts are really usesful.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Tamer,

You should be presenting Pete with 10 points and me with probably 3 or less.

-Sri
PS: 0 for this please.

[Tamer Shaalan]

Ok Sri, this is another 5 for him.

both of you are really professional, and funny !!!!

Tamer.

[Tamer Shaalan]

Sri !!! another chance for you

I forgot how to write to a remote tape on another machine ? i.e., what is all required permissions steps to write to : remotesys:/dev/rmt/0m ??

Tamer.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi Tamer,

You will need to be able to either 'ssh' (secured) or 'remsh' (unsecured) to the other system. For 'ssh' setup public/private key authentication. For 'remsh' setup .rhosts in the home directory of 'root' as "hostA root". Ensure that you are able to do 'remsh hostB ll /etc/passwd' successfully without supplying the password. Once that is successful, rest is easy.

dd if=/dev/rmt/0mn bs=2k |remsh hostB dd of=/dev/rmt/1mn

Do the same for the os_archive. Remember that you have to run the tape operations sequentially otherwise it may not work. Before doing anything put the tapes in the original position by runing 'mt -t /dev/rmt/0m rew' command.

-Sri