IGNITE SERVER

[Nobody's Hero]

I;d like to build an ignite server rather that backing up all our systems to tape using make_ignition. I can't seem to find a document that can help me build an ignite server. Can someone help me? How does this work? You can use ignite to save an existing servers config to an ignite servers disk?

[Robert-Jan Goossens · Accepted solution]

Hi,

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/B2355-90767/00/00/9-con.html

Hope it helps,

Robert-Jan.

[John Poff]

Hi,

We setup an Ignite server here a few months ago, and it works great. What happens is that the system that becomes the Ignite server will use NFS to export a filesystem over to the box that you are making an Ignite archive of, and the archive goes across the network to the Ignite server. Depending on how many servers you want to backup, you'll need to have enough disk storage to keep the archives. We happened to have an AutoRaid array that was not being used, so we connected it to our Ignite server and we use that for our storage.

JP

[Kelli Ward]

Hi,

Quick, down and dirty. (GUI mode)

Run /opt/ignite/bin/ignite

It will open a pop up window for server set up.
There will be a number of instructions you will see but the only thing you should need to add is an ipaddress range on the window that requests one. Two addresses is all you need unless you know there will be numerous recoveries running at once. (The server will dish these out at recovery time.)

Once finished, a window similar to a SAM window will be ready to use. Go to Actions -> Add a Client for Recovery and add the hostname.
It will poll for the client and set it up for backup.

Once the Client is set up, you can right click on it and run a network based backup on it.

A couple of notes:
You will need a lot of space in /var, archives are loaded to /var/opt/ignite/recovery/archives
Make sure your ignite server is NFS server enabled and your clients are NFS client enabled.
Also, ensure your server has remsh access to its clients and that it can resolve host names either by dns or entries in /etc/hosts
Beware of running a backup on a system that is actively in use unless it is running Online Journeled Filesystem. If not, you should have exclusive access to the system for an hour or so.
Read the documentation, what I showed is a quick way to actually perform a backup, but ignite is capable of quite a bit more and the instructions above obviously won't customize for your individual situation, but it can get you going quickly for test purposes.

Happy Holidays,
Kel

[hpuxhelp]

HI John,
The set up that you mentioned in the thread is the kind of set up that I'd like to test for my environment?
can you give me a little more details in term on how you set up? We want to be able to use the storage disk to store all of the backup instead of using tape... and want to be able to use to boot the system up at previous known state?