TOOL FOR DISASTER RECOVERY

[f. halili]

Is there a tool/system that's out there that is good for disaster recovery for LINUX. I need a tool that could do a recovery via ( bootp or PXE boot ) and proceed recovery via the network

THANKS!!

[Bill Thorsteinson]

I haven't had a need for a disaster recovery tool for
Linux. If what you are looking to do is recover a
standard image from a common server then you
could build a small bootp image that runs a short script
to configure and build the disk partitions, then restores
the partitions over the network. Most distributions
will allow you to do this.

You could also try recovering a disk image in the same
manner. This presumes the disaster was not a failure
of the Disk, CPU, memory, network card, or other
failure from which you can't automatically recover.

Most distributions have funtional rescue disks
that run off of one or two floppies. I can install a
functional debian distribution over the net in under an
hour including time to dowload the floppy images, copy
them to disk, and brush up on the installation guide.

The best reference I have found so far is the O'Rielly
UNIX Backup and Recovery book.

[Joe Doe Sr]

Also take a look at the LinuxCare CD. It has a basic Debian install on it and you can do almost everything you need to do. And its small enough to fit on a creditcard size cd.

[f. halili]

Hmm.. I'll assign minimal points for now.... any additonal option is appreciated

[Sachin Patel]

Well we uses dd to secondary disk. We have 25 Cluster with 25 master each has two disk.

Sachin

[Wodisch]

Hello Frederick,

would using "Tom's Root and Boot Disk" be a valid
option for you? It is just a single floppy, but includes
networking, so you could then do a "rsh dd" to restore
the disk...

HTH,
Wodisch

[I_M]

Hi

There is a tool called partition image.
It is a tool for cold backup/recovery tool.

I am not sure which scsi cards are supported,though.

http://www.partimage.org/

enjoy

masanari iida

[f. halili]

the linux box that i plan to recover does not have a flopy drive, so i cannot use a boot diskette ... a network boot, then do the recovery is what i'm trying to look at..............

[Kodjo Agbenu]

Hello,

I have never heard about such a tool in OpenSource projects.

I know that companies that are specialized in Linux compute farms (clustering) have developed proprietary tools to rapidly deploy and install/recover linux boxes. But I'm not sure they are going to release these utilities in OpenSource community :-(

Currently, I'm trying to develop a tool based on a boot floppy and DDS tape.
When this works, the next step will be allowing the user to recover from NFS or SMBFS mount instead of DDS.
I had no plans to replace the floppy by the use of PXE or BOOTP/DHCP, because all PCs or Intel i386-based servers have a floppy drive. Therefore, it may be an interesting feature to eliminate the floppy drive and have a full network-based recovery or deployment solution.

I have no time these days to develop this tool, but if it was the case, here are the directions I would explore :

-> How to use the BIOS (setup) to be able to boot via the network.

-> If the BIOS is able to deal with bootp or dhcp, the next steps seem trivial : in the BOOTP or DHCP replies, you can specify a boot file that the BIOS will download (via TFTP) and use to boot up (this file is the linux kernel). Therefore, supposing that the kernel is compiled to have its root filesystem on NFS, the rest could be very simple.

-> If the BIOS is not able to understand BOOTP or DHCP protocols, then only PXE can be used. However, I don't have any information about that protocol. If I had to develop a recovery tool via Network, I would try to gather and read documentation about PXE.

Good luck.

Kodjo

[Kodjo Agbenu]

Hello,

After having posted the previous reply, I made a little research on google.com and found the "etherboot" project on SourceForge.

It appears that the boot file returned via bootp/dhcp must have a pre-defined format.
The "etherboot" utility is a "rom code" to be flashed in a eprom and plugged into your network adapter in a socket especially designed for this.

The etherboot is then able to retrieve the kernel via bootp and behave as a PCI chip that have its own boot code (exactly like if you were booting from an SCSI adapter with its own BIOS).

To read further information :

http://etherboot.sourceforge.net/doc/html/devman-3.html

Good luck

Kodjo