Fast recovery from system disk crash

[Laurence Beard]

Hi all,

I am used to AIX where you can create a system image to tape (mksysb tape)on a daily bases. This worked well!
What is the fast track method recommended to rebuilding a system disk upon a total loss (including redundancy gone too!) to the state it was just prior to failure.

regard

regards

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The tool for this is Ignite/UX. Search for Ignite and you will get tons of hits.

Plan B (and actually my patented favorite method) Lifeboat disks.

The idea is that periodically you do raw disk copies of your system disk(s) to lifeboat disks. If disaster strikes (like really, really bad patches) or your own stupidity (rm -r *, oops), you shudown, yank out the boot disk(s) and move the lifeboat disk(s) into the boot disk slot(s). Power back up and after a few quick automatic fsck's you are back in business in a fraction of the time of any other method.

Being paranoid, I mirror everything, do make_tape_recovery's (the Ignite image), and lifeboat weekly (or before any patch install). When you do all of this, you never need the tapes or the lifeboats -- it's one of God's little jokes.

[Ranjith_5]

Hi Laurence,

SYSTEM RECOVERY USING IGNITE-UX
-------------------------------------

The steps are as follows:

1. Download and install Ignite-UX from
< www.software.hp.com >

2. Insert a tape into your tape drive (/dev/rmt/0m) and run following command while the system has little or no activity. You might need to specify the full path leading to the command.

# make_tape_recovery -A

This is a newer command. It used to be "make_recovery -AC". The command uses /dev/rmt/0mn as the default tape device for making the recovery tape. This command backs up every file in the root disk/volume vg00 and later make it possible to use the check_recovery command, to see how much has changed on the system since the tape was made.

3. Ensure that you have a good full backup of your system. The make_tape_recovery utility was not designed to replace standard backup procedures for all your data files.

4. Review the log files:
/var/opt/ignite/logs/makrec.log1 #Logs progress reports
/var/opt/ignite/logs/makrec.log2 #Logs an Index of filesets stored on tape

In the event of a catastrophic failure of your root disk(s). Use the following procedure to recover:

1. Replace the disk(s)

2. Insert latest make_tape_recovery tape into the tape drive and boot the system.

3. Interrupt the boot process, initiate a search and boot from your tape drive.

Main Menu: search ipl
Main Menu: boot scsi.#.0

4. Don't interrupt the recovery process. Allow the recovery process to continue non-interactively.

5.Once the system boots (approx 1-2 hrs, depending on archive size), recover latest backups.

DOCS n DOWNLOAD:-
-----------------------

1.) http://www.software.hp.com/products/IUX/docs/sysadm.html
2.) http://www.software.hp.com/products/IUX/infolib.html#N100E0


FAQ:-
----------
http://www.cs.uu.nl/wais/html/na-dir/hp/Ignite-UX_faq.html



Best Regards,
Syam

[Laurence Beard]

Thanks I will do some testing.