Full system recovery WITHOUT Ignite or make_tape_recovery

[WSS]

Full system recovery WITHOUT Ignite or make_tape_recovery

Hi there ... Been trying to find out something about his on the web, but can't seem to find anything.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to doing a full system recovery (rebuild from scratch) without using Ignite or from make_tape_recovery.

ie from booting off CD and re-installing the os, to dumping the data off tape backups etc.

Any info would be useful.

Thanks alot
Trev

[Muthukumar_5]

Which version you are going to install? Check several documents available in, http://docs.hp.com/

hth.

[Muthukumar_5]

Get "Installation and Update Guide" for which version you are to install and go to installation part.

hth.

[Pete Randall]

I just went through this last week. I lost a disk drive in one of my workstations and, after replacing it, had to reinstall HP-UX, applications, patch bundles, and then restore user data from conventional backup. Do you have any particular questions? Have you done installs before? Restores?


Pete

[WSS]

You're missing my point. If there has been a running system, which needs to be recovered, surely there are ceratin steps to take to recover only certain data from tape backups ???

You wouldn't just go and recover everything from tape? All of /, /etc, /home, /opt, /var etc etc....

Or would you??

[WSS]

Thanks Pete, now you are getting the point :-)

Yeah I am ok with re-intalling to a fresh intall from CD, and also the steps to recovery the data, so just need a point form step by step plan of what you did ... What you needed to do specially. Did you recover each and every filesystem from tape for the root disk??

So you built the os again with the hostname, IP, routing etc etc, then did what?

Thanks
Trev

[Pete Randall]

I treat it just like a new install. Once the install is done I copy the config files that we have modified from another machine:

/etc/exports
/etc/auto_master
/etc/hosts
/etc/profile
/etc/nsswitch.conf
/etc/resolv.conf
/etc/passwd
/etc/group
/etc/PATH
/etc/services
/etc/inetd.conf
any CDE configs
any /usr/local/bin scripts

Then I restore /home and any other user data from backup (in this case, the workstation had a 50GB file system that needed to be restored).


Pete

[WSS]

Great Pete, thanks for your input. I would have to recover the files you talk of from backup tapes, but that would be fine.

I will to try and think of all the config files, and files special to my system that I would need to recover.

Thanks for your helpful info ...
Trev

[Pete Randall]

Trev,

I keep a script that copies all these files so I don't forget any. In your case it doesn't sound like you have a way to copy so you'll need to make a list and use it to restore specific files.

I missed a couple in my previous list:

/usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc/fonts.alias
/etc/shells
/etc/mail/userdb
/etc/mail/userdb.db
/etc/mail/sendmail.cf
/etc/mail/sendmail.cw
/etc/rc.config.d/netconf

Any CDE modifications should be in /etc/dt, so check there, too.


Pete

[Denver Osborn]

I'm pretty sure that HP has a doc that will help with what _NOT_ to restore from your full backup after a cold install.

You could perform the cold install, then full restore excluding specific os related files from the restore. I can't remember the doc id, but it should list excluding things like

/etc/fstab
/etc/lvmtab
/etc/lvmconf
/etc/ioconfig
/dev/vg*
/dev/rdsk
/dev/dsk
/dev/rmt
/stand/??? <- can't remember, but there are somethings in stand not to restore after a cold install...

hope this helps,
-denver

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

I've done quite a few complete restores, some of them even while the system being up and running. We're running NetWorker client on these systems, and i.e. typical disasters like rm's of /dev or / were solved easily as long as the binaries and libs needed for the recover were still available. In those situations I'll start a recover of the whole system w/o overwriting.

otherwise the usual route is a base HP-UX install from either standard OS media or Ignite server. With the OS media I'll only add the NetWorker fileset and then start the recover.

If the h/w is identical and all paths (/dev/dsk...) I'll just recover+replace everything, otherwise I'll keep the new systems /etc/ioconfig. After the recover has ended, edit /etc/inittab to boot to runlevel 1 and reboot.

Then carefully check external vg's and such, re-mirror vg00 and go online again (init 3).

[Stephen Keane]

Don't restore /stand/rootconf