[ILUG] Installing lilo on another disk.

[Ronan Cunniffe]

Quoting Niall O Broin <niall at linux.ie>:

> I'm installing warm standby disks on a number of boxes. These disks will be
> the same size (sometimes bigger) than the main disk. The idea is that every
> night I'll rsync the partitions on the main disk to the standby disk so
> that
> in the case of disaster, the first port of call, before the tapes, is the
> standby disk. (We did consider running Linux md RAID on the disks but RAID
> gives you no protection against slips of the finger)

Do I get beaten round the head for saying "floppy"?
Assuming the machines are networked, let each one send a copy of its kernel to
the others.  If the drives are open-the-box-and-switch-cables, then you can
start dd'ing a floppy before you start.  If the drives are in drawers, then this
might slow you down by all of 60 seconds.

Alternatively, you could use netboot.  No, I'm serious.  Set the boot sequence
to first hard disk then network.  Do NOT make any partition on the standby
active.  Have a look at the etherboot package.  One of the things it contains is
a pascal-ish language for writing boot menus.  You can write a one-liner that
basically says "boot /dev/hda1" (or whatever, there's example code).  IIRC, the
resulting "bootable image" is a whopping 4K.  The downside is you'll need a
bootp and tftp server somewhere....

hth,
Ronan.