HPUX Itanium recovery planning using Make_net_recovery

[Tony Drake_2]

I am in the process of updating our DR Plan and want to know if anyone has experience with DR planning and Itaniums.

The problem we have is this:

According to the software handbook from HP, to recover an Itanium server using Make Net Recovery, you must have one and only one ignite, bootp, or dhcp server on the subnet being used by the server for the make net recovery.

In our environment, this is a problem because we use large subnets, and they house a number of different divisions at once so we do not control the subnetting or what is on the subnet or what services any server is using or providing.


Anyone have any ideas?

[John Waller]

I've recently started using make_net_recovery myself. We perform our network ignites to an HPUX server. We also have a LINUX server which acts as our DHCP/Bootp and DNS server. We mainly have PA RISC servers and a "boot lan. install" finds the ignite server without a problem. The only thing we need to be careful of is manually setting the correct network information as it does appear to pickup an IP address from the LINIX DHCP server. I have also recovered an Itanium but that was June last year. I think I just used the same method to recover.

[Tony Drake_2]

Thanks for the reply. however, ITanium does not allow for boot lan ...there is a single command (lanboot) that will take the first server it finds and try to use it. Hence the problem.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

Maybe You'd be best off by getting secondary network adapters for the itanium client and the ignite server and have Your networking people set up a small vlan for that purpose.

It should be fine with them, as installation tasks will stay out of the production net, etc...

[Tony Drake_2]

I had thought of putting the itaniums on their own subnet, but I was hoping that there was some other way. To do that requires taking other IP addresses out of circulation on our network to create the subnet.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

If You could use additional NICs, You could go with a separate, private LAN, otherwise the subnet probably is the way to go.

Even easier, if it's a few boxes only, simply plug them into a switch dangling at the second nic in the ignite server.
BUT - for a D/R case this probably too error-prone...

Otherwise - how many bootp servers are there?
If the administrative hassle is acceptable, You could check the bootptabs on all of them to ensure that only the ignite server replies to those specific clients.

Also, You could give them specific settings on all the other bootp servers helping them bootstrap from the ignite server.
(A friend of mine even installs Solaris Flash images via the existing W2K DHCP server, it works flawless)

I can't really recommend any of these ways, but maybe You can make something from it :)