Conference turris::digital_unix

8662.0. "System disk re-creation with AdvFS..." by HGOVC::NANDAN () Fri Jan 31 1997 02:35

    
    A customer was using 3.2C which was upgraded to 3.2G. They are 
    using AdvFS both for the / & /usr. This along with the swap uses 
    up one disk. By the way, the disks are configured with RAID 5.
    
    They are a telephone company & since it is a critical application, 
    they are doing dummy recovery exercises.
    
    They want to recover the system disk exactly as before, say a 
    system disk crash. The idea is that it would contain a lot of 
    configuration details, which they should not have to go thru' 
    again. They would like to avoid LSM & mirroring.
    
    The customer therefore did a 'vdump' of the system disk. Now they 
    replace a fresh set of disks (since its RAID).
    
    Then using a 3.2G CDROM, they try to create a similar 
    configuration as the earlier disks (disklabels, etc are okay).
    
    ------------------------------------------------------------------
    Problem 1
    ---------
    When they try to 'vrestore' the root (64MB) especially, they get 
    an error for the root. (But restoration of the /usr seems to go 
    through).
    #vrestore -x /
    vrestore : Date of the vdump save-set : Wed Jan 22 13:52:41 1997
    vrestore : <.>; Out of disk space
    vrestore : Do you want to abort the restore ? (yes or no)
    
    Since they were experimenting anyway, they increased the size of 
    the root partition.
    
    Now, the restoration goes thru', but some daemons do not start up.
    
    I do not find any examples of this in the manual. So is this idea, 
    or concept of using 'vdump' & 'vrestore' for the system disk 
    wrong ?
    
    Problem 2
    ---------
    The other thing they wanted to try out was to boot with the 3.2G 
    CDROM, go into 'System Management' and then use 'vrestore' to 
    restore the system.
    
    The versions of 'vdump' & 'vrestore' on the CDROM are 1.3, whereas 
    the 'vdump' taken with 3.2G is at 4.0.
    
    So, they are not able to use this method.
    
    ------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    I am sure there are many who have done this before. Can someone 
    please give some advice on this.
    
    Thanks in advance.
    
    Nandan
    ---------------
    Cross-posted in DECWET::ADVFS_SUPPORT also.