Contingency planning for System Failure Post: 302350321

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Operating Systems Solaris Contingency planning for System Failure Post 302350321 by Tirmazi on Thursday 3rd of September 2009 11:55:54 AM

09-03-2009

Registered User

Contingency planning for System Failure

I have inhereted a Solaris 8 server which is running an important application in our production environment.
The dilema is that the server has just one internal hard drive I believe it was installed using jump start, it does not even have a CD ROM drive and root is not mirrored (since there is only one hard drive)
I cannot take the server down for any reason.
The best I could do is take the backup of the entire server from root on a tape using netbackup.
The only comforting aspect is that I have a server similar to this server which I can use in case of emergency which does have a CD ROM drive.
My question is, if the server dies, what can I do now to restore with minimum down time on to the spare server

I was inclined and please correct me if I am wrong is to create a flash archive from root of this server on to another server's spare drive.

Quote:

flarcreate -n flash_root_archive -c -R / -e root_archive -x /anotherdrive/flash -a admin_operator -S anotherserver:/anotherdrive/flash/flash_archive1

If the server dies I can use the spare server, boot it from solaris 8 CD and do an installation using flash archive i have created.

Please excuse my ignorance, but I surely appreciate some guidence.

Thanks

Last edited by Tirmazi; 09-03-2009 at 01:03 PM..

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LEARN ABOUT OPENSOLARIS

root_archive

root_archive(1M)					  System Administration Commands					  root_archive(1M)

NAME

       root_archive - manage bootable miniroot archives

SYNOPSIS

       /boot/solaris/bin/root_archive  pack archive root

       /boot/solaris/bin/root_archive  unpack archive root

       /boot/solaris/bin/root_archive  packmedia solaris_image root

       /boot/solaris/bin/root_archive  unpackmedia solaris_image root

DESCRIPTION

       The  root_archive  utility  is  used to manage bootable miniroot archives and is currently only available on x86 platforms. The utility can
       pack and unpack boot/root archives in both ufs and hsfs (iso9660) format. It will always generate ufs archives.

       root_archive also uses the lofi file driver to export a file as a block device (see lofi(7D)) and mount to mount or  unmount  file  systems
       and remote resources (see mount(1M)). root_archive requires the same privileges that are needed to run these commands.

SUBCOMMANDS

       The root_archive command has the following subcommands:

       pack archive root    Pack from the image found under the root directory to the archive.

       unpack archive root

	   Unpack from the archive to an unpacked image under the root directory.

       packmedia solaris_image root

	   Pack the solaris image to the root directory.

       unpackmedia solaris_image root

	   Unpack the solaris image from the root directory.

       For  packmedia  and  unpackmedia,  other items that do not go into the ramdisk image are copied or uncopied (see cpio(1)) as well. Specifi-
       cally, this includes all the packaging databases needed for pkgadd and the other packaging utilities to succeed which are not used  in  the
       running and hence pruned to conserve memory.

EXAMPLES

       Example 1 Unpacking the Solaris x86 install image

       The following command unpacks the current Solaris image from the root directory:

	 # root_archive unpackmedia 
	 /export/nv/solarisdvd.nvx_dvd/latest /export/Boot

       Where  /export/nv/solarisdvd.nvx_dvd/latest  represents	a path to a Solaris x86 install image and /export/Boot is a directory that will be
       purged or created, as necessary.

       Example 2 Packing the Solaris x86 install image

       The following command packs the current Solaris image to the root directory:

	 # root_archive packmedia 
	 /export/nv/solarisdvd.nvx_dvd/latest /export/Boot

EXIT STATUS

       The following exit values are returned:

       0    The command completed successfully.

       1    The command exited due to an error.

ATTRIBUTES

       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |      ATTRIBUTE TYPE	     |	    ATTRIBUTE VALUE	   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Availability		     |SUNWcsu			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+
       |Interface Stability	     |Stable			   |
       +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+

SEE ALSO

       cpio(1), bootadm(1M), mount(1M), attributes(5), lofi(7D)

SunOS 5.11							    26 Sep 2005 						  root_archive(1M)