Testing a boot tape

[Haitham Hamad]

I am testing a boot tape in preparation for production. I have a mirrored root disk. My plant is as follows;

1- create a boot tape (does it matter if the boot tape is created before or after reducing a mirror)
2-lvreduce the mirror disk
3- boot from tape
4- install on the mirror disk

If I was able to boot from the mirror disk after recovery, does that conclude the test or do I have to do anything for the new root to communicate with disks/system?

Thanks
Haitham

[harry d brown jr]

If you recover from tape, it will not re-establish the mirroring, thus it's not important to worry about reducing it.

You do have the latest ignite installed, correct?

live free or die
harry

[Haitham Hamad]

Thanks, I do have the latest ignite B.5.4.50

Actually, what I wanted to do is to test a failure scenario. To test it, I thought I would use the mirror disk as "a new disk" and recover from tape into that disk.

[harry d brown jr]

Then make sure you use the "-i" option on make_recovery so you can change the disks manually.

live free or die
harry

[Haitham Hamad]

I made the boot tape to be interactive. Are there any steps needed after recovering to a "new disk". E.g. I have an Oracle database in that system, so I assume that I may have to relink it again?

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi,

1. It's a good idea to reduce the mirror. Takes fraction of a minute with a small script. Though ignite doesn't re-establish mirrors, it will add the mirror disk into vg00 configuration after recovery. So, there is a slight chance for losing your old OS.'

And not only that, if you want to boot from the primary disk, you will need to fix your mirror disk using "vgcfgrestore" etc., etc as the disk would lose original PVRA/VGDA due to recovery action.

Recovering/upgrading the OS on the mirror disk is always a very good idea.

-Sri

[Bernhard Mueller]

Haitham,

as Shridar said order of your steps 1 and 2 is important and makes a difference.

For safety you should first lvreduce the mirrors and vgreduce to exclude the mirror disk from the root vg. Then run "make_tape_recovery -I -x inc_entire=vg00"

Then you select a different disk to restore to and this will be the *only* disk that will be touched upon restore.

*If* you first cut the tape you can still exclude your original disk before the restore but you have to consider it as well as changing the boot disk.

Regards,
Bernhard