Making Ignite Recovery Tapes

[Ian Foster]

I'm suitably embarrassed to admit we have not as an organisation implemented Ignite backup routines long ago, but I guess it's better late than too late!

My question is simple (but possibly stupid!) - if I'm gong to run a make_recovery_tape with Ignite on our N class 9000 server is it valid to do this during normal multi-user operations (system overhead aside) or should we really take the box down to single user mode to secure the bootable image?

None of the mans I have got my hands on seem to specify this one way or the other.

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

Ian,

Don't be embarassed. It's a very valid question.

Ideally, one would do this from single-user mode. Practically, very few people do. I have seen no ill-effects from doing this in multi-user mode, though it's probably safest to set it up in cron to run during a quiet period (assuming your box has a quiet period).


Pete

[Geoff Wild]

You can run them any time you like.

If you setup an ignite server - then you can store the images on it instead of on a local tape.

We run our site like that, then in the servers, just put a job in cron:

30 11 * * 5 /opt/ignite/bin/make_net_recovery -s igniteserver1 -x inc_entire=vg00


Rgds...Geoff

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Ian:

This is not a stupid question. You can safely create a perfectly good Ignite recovery tape while your server is running in normal multi-user mode, assuming that you are archiving standard vg00 filesystems (in which few changes would be occuring).

You may find an occassional 'pax' warning about a file that is no longer present. This is not a problem. It simply represents a temporary file that *was* present when a directory analysis was performed, but the file was removed before it could be archived to tape.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Ian Foster]

Cheers guys.

Boat drinks all round !

[Dario_1]

Hi!

One way or the other it will work. I will not worry about not been able to bring the machine to single user mode to do it because the company does not provide you with time to do it. Just create the ignite tape, it is better to be safe than sorry...

Regards,

Dario

[twang]

Yes, you can comfortably create ignote-ux tape in multi-user mode. In my site, we schedule a cronjob to run make_net_recovery to backup vg00 of all our servers at lunch time everyday.