what problem will be when using other's /var?

[stephen peng]

guys,
HP_UX 11.23, /var corrupted, copy /var from other server, will it be a serious mistake?

regards
Stephen

[Pete Randall]

I would have to say it is most likely a huge mistake. Unless the other server is IDENTICAL (which is nearly impossible to accomplish). Think about /var/opt, /var/patches. Are the crontabs (/var/spool/cron) identical?

You would be much, much better off to rebuild your /var from backup.


Pete

[ani007]

Hope you have veritas netbackup.so restore it ASAP.

[shikhar_1]

If /var is corrupted, u should take the server in single user mode and run fsck on that file system(/dev/vg00/lvol?). I believe this will rectify the corrupted /var and if it is not resolving the issue then u should restore the backup through netbackup or whatever u r using for backup..

[stephen peng]

these two nodes belong to same cluster. they were built up together 3 years before.
fsck failed to recover /var, and no backup for restoring.

regards
Stephen

[Pete Randall]

Is the machine running with this copied /var? Have you been able to successfully reboot it? How recently have patches been applied and what are the possibilities that patches may have to be rolled back (swremove)?

Since you have no backup (shame on you!), the only other possibility is to rebuild the machine from scratch, so it might be worth running with the copied /var until something goes wrong and then rebuild it.

It really comes down to a question of whether you can afford the downtime to rebuild it now or you would rather *try* to wait until later.


Pete

[amipankaj]

In any case, coying /var is not good idea. Its better to recover troubled system from ignite of other one in the cluster.


Cheers!
Pankaj

[shikhar_1]

Its a two node cluster? If so then definitely the root disk would be mirrored. Pls check the lvol for /var is mirrored or not? if it mirrored then u can restore the data.
How can u say that /var is corruted? did u getting any error?
Pls reply with all the information.
Fire these commands and give me the o/p
1.vgdispaly -v vg00
2.cmviewcl
3.lvlnboot -v
4.setboot

[stephen peng]

guys,
this copy job has been done, and the server looks not bad now. of course there were something weird happened.
but it seems that no one has ever explain what harm would do to the server using other's /var.

regards
Stephen

[Pete Randall]

Well I thought I implied where problems could arise.

/var/opt contains files required by the various optional software packages you may have loaded on your system. /var/adm/sw contains the SD "database". Those two would be my main concern. If you have software that is loaded into /opt which expects to record data into /var/opt, it won't work. If you attempt to do anything involving SD (applying or removing patches, loading software, etc), you will have difficulty if/because things don't match between what is loaded in /opt and what is recorded in the database.

I'm sure the list goes on, but that's the start.


Pete