UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

ok guys, I have been given a big project, I need to implement alt boot on over 40+ servers, mainly solaris 8 and AIX 4.3, AIX 5.1. A couple of questions

1)can someone describe alt boot, my take is that if the primary disk fails(disk with root filesystems), this altboot disk takes over

2)can someone pick one of the os's above and describe what I need to do

Thank you very much for any help

My take would be that you have a second free disk and you want to copy your boot disk to it. Then if the primary disk fails, you can simply manually boot from the alternate disk.

Solaris has a package called DiskSuite that can mirror the disk. Do you have that available? I think it might be a separate product.

no, i dont think we have disksuite, and i think this is different than mirroring......

Troubleshooting - ODS and alternate boot

FYI- you stated you run Solaris 8 - that comes with DiskSuite (also known as ODS)
The metastat, metattach, ... commands are in /usr/sbin. If you don't use it, then you would have to do a ufsdump of the root disk onto another, install the boot block, and then update every so often with ufsdump (you would still need to do any steps to know what the device is, set up a devalias for that disk to boot from).

ok, after some research here, we use veritas for filesystem management, however my current assignment, is to just look and see if we have alt boot setup already, how would I be able to tell? I have never worked with or setup altboot....