I had a hard drive fail and am trying to restore a system backup from a file I created about two years ago. At the time I did not have a tape device to use nor a writeable CD drive so I just backed up the machine to a NFS drive. When I created the backup, I used it to set up another machine with the same configuration and it worked so I am pretty sure it is a valid backup. Now I cannot find the documentation I used to perform the backup (to see what I did) nor the info I used to restore the backup to another machine. Any ideas of how this might work? I have searched around for a how-to but have not found one.

Did you create the backup with

cpio?

tar?

backup?

mksysb?

This is as good a start as any... IBM Wikis - AIX 5L Wiki - AIXV53Backup

I used mksysb to direct the backup to a file instead of a tape... I was able to get the restore work for the most part when I increased the size of my /usr filesystem to handle the data being restored. Now the machine boots up fine but there is a problem with the tcpip. When the machine booted up it came up with the correct name but incorrect ip address, I used both smitty and mktcpip to change the ip address and I got this error:

# mktcpip -h 'catia16' -a '192.168.8.116' -m '255.255.255.0' -i 'en0' -t 'N/A'
en0
catia16
Method error (/usr/lib/methods/chginet):
0514-068 Cause not known.
exec(): 0509-036 Cannot load program /usr/lib/methods/chginet because of the following errors:
0509-130 Symbol resolution failed for chginet because:
0509-136 Symbol __which_res_state (number 35) is not exported from
dependent module /usr/lib/libc.a(shr.o).
0509-192 Examine .loader section symbols with the
'dump -Tv' command.

mktcpip: Problem with command: chdev
, return code = 1

what is causing this? I changed the ip address and name in the /etc/hosts and it seems to be fine but I would like to be able to change within smitty or by changing parameters with mktcpip at the command line. All NFS mount work, I can telnet to it, and all other communication seems fine.

This is *not* an authoriative answer, but that makes me think there is a binary mismatch, you may need to apply some patches to update libc.

Have you checked the uname and oslevel of what you think you have restored?

uname -a
AIX catia16 3 4 0003525F4C00
oslevel
4.3.3.0

Which is what I expect to see. However I was wrong when I said I could telnet to it. I cannot telnet or ping either to or from. I will try to use some of ML software I have to see if I can patch up the libc software.

Just to close this out, this is what I ended up doing:

1. Installed Base 4.3.3 OS to get machine up and running.
2. Downloaded and installed firmware update for CDROM
3. Used network mounts to get OS ML up to 11.
4. Transferred backup image from old machine to CD
5. Brought new machine down to maintenance shell
6. Created CDROM file system.
7. Mounted cdrom and restored backup image onto new machine.
8. Rebooted new machine, updated /etc/hosts file, tested network communication (ping, telnet and ftp) and then reinstalled software to get machine back up to ML11.

Machine works fine and was deployed to end user this morning.

Excellent, thanks for posting your eventual fix as well.