[ILUG] BareBones system recovery backup apps

[Conor Daly]

On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 12:53:43PM +0100 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Conor Wynne thought:
> 
> What are we looking at? Mondorescue?

I'm looking at mondorescue for sure...  We just got our new applications
server {runs all the applications that talk to our Climate database and
{for the first time} it's a Dell Poweredge 2850 machine running RHEL {last
three machines were Solaris}.  I ran a mondoarchive backup yesterday and
did a test restore and all was well...  nearly.  mondo couldn't find my
boot loader at backup time so I told it to use GRUB and that it lived on
/dev/sda3 {RHEL /boot partition} '-l GRUB -f /dev/sda3'.  At restore time,
mondo put GRUB into /dev/sda3 but put nothing into the MBR on /dev/sda so
we were left with an unbootable system.  A bit of chrooting and
grub-install jiggery pokery later and we had the system back but with GRUB
in the MBR instead of Dell's bootloader.

Now, we wanted to put the system back just as it had been so we did a
restore using the Dell OpenManage CD {incidentally, where are the sources
for this?} and we now have the system back as it was.  To get mondoarchive
to properly backup / restore this setup it must backup the MBR and restore
that as the bootloader '-l RAW'.  Unfortunately, this leaves GRUB not
installed {on /dev/sda3} so it is necessary to use a 'post-nuke' script
'-P <post-nuke-tarball>' to do this bit.  Also, the Dell Diagnostic
partition must be backed up.  This can either be done by mounting it under
RH {it's fat16} or by using mondo's "image partition" switch '-x
/dev/sda1'.  The final invocation we used {test backup is to hard disk,
real ones will be to tape} was:

mondoarchive -O -i -s 700m -d /d8/backup -l RAW -P /root/grub-install.tgz
	     -x /dev/sda1

where /root/grub-install.tgz contains the script 'post-nuke' which looks
like:

#########################################
mount-me	# Mounts system's partitions on /mnt/RESTORING
chroot /mnt/RESTORING
grub-install (hd0,2)
exit
unmount-me	# unmounts system's partitions
#########################################

Well, actually we didn't run this yet.  We're testing this invocation in
the morning so I'll let you know how it went.  We've also to see if mondo
/ RHEL 3 can cope with the Dell tape autoloader we got with the system...

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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