I think what you are looking for is something comparable to the AIX
mksysb, the HP-UX Ignite tape
make_recovery etc. so that you can clone / DR your server without having a Kickstart/Jumpstart (Solaris)/NIM (AIX) server that you would have to build first.
From what I have seen so far, there is no easy process, but when running Solaris many years ago, we had to do a set of filesystem saves. Our recovery process was a bit convoluted, but was basically:-
- Boot the new server to single user from install CD
- Slice the target boot disk according to our documentation
- Restore the filesystems to the correct slices with ufsrestore
- Delete and re-create the device mappings (can't remember how now)
- Remove the encrypted password for root
- Unmount all restored filesystems and boot.
I'm informed that I will have to build and manage Red Hat servers in future, so I too am after a sensible process to follow, but at worst I will probably end up doing something like the above, but that relies on documentation to be kept up to date and can get messey.
Our aim has always been to just put back a base operating system, but
our operating system not just a plain install. We then would rebuild the volume groups definitions (AIX
saveg/restvg excluding all files) we saved into the root filesystem before the DR backup was taken and then used the 3rd party backup tool to put back the data to the non-system filesystems and databases.
I hope that this helps that someone else can make some suggestions.
Robin
Liverpool/Blackburn
UK