UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I'm currently an CS intern working at a small biotech company that has just opened a new office. We are working on a new project, but we were given an older Sun workstation with just a SCSI interface in the back. We don't have a systems administrator, so a couple of us have been working hard to figure out where to start.

From what I can tell, the workstation has two 70-gig hard drives. About 120-gigs of it is mounted, but only about 6 gigs of it are in use. This, of course, will increase in the future.

Right now, we are looking into purchasing a Sun 40/80 DDS-4 Unipack Tape Drive from Sun. This is going to set the company back about $1600. This seems a little ridiculous, considering the workstation is only worth a couple hundred bucks. We've found several less costly tape drives, but they probably don't offer the support that Sun will. Is it worth paying for the support, or is there a more viable solution?

(Just in advance, there will be more questions on the actual backup procedure once we decide on one. )

If you don't want to do the local tape backup thing, you've got quite a few options, really.

You could:

- Connect the machine to a network, and use an 'scp' script (part of OpenSSH, which has a Solaris port here) or Amanda network backup software to store on a remote tape device.

- Buy a SCSI DVD+/-RW drive and load some open source DVD burning software onto Solaris and then write a script to cycle clear/rewrite some +RW or -RW discs every night.

- Buy an external hard disk unit, only power it up and mount it when you want to copy files.

I would highly recommend purchasing two books to help you on your way:

1. Essential System Administration (Frisch)
2. UNIX Backup & Recovery (Preston)

HTH.

yup,
the cheapest way is to buy an external disk... plumb it and mount it... solaris has a nice tool called "ufsdump" which could also be used interactive "ufsrestore -i" so... have a look at:
man ufsdump
man ufsrestore

tip: there is no need to buy only original sun hardware, also 3rd party works. as it seems, you are using already using not sun supported disks.... 70 gig in an ULTRA 60 ?¿? *nabbed-ya* hehe

Thanks for the input guys.

I like the idea of using an external hard drive. It would almost be the same as ufsdump-ing to a local tape drive, right? I actually haven't had much experience with Unix systems, so those two O'Reilly books look like they might be useful.

Another alternative we have come across is to backup the Unix machine onto a Windows 2000 Server via a crossover cable. We already have an Iomega REV tape drive that connects to the Windows server (had to buy a USB 2.0 PCI card). Can a dump of the Unix machine be transferred into a Windows file system (and then to the REV drive) and still preserve its ufs attributes?

Also, if this is feasible, would recovery be as simple as dumping?


Jim@PSC

Personally I would tar.gz the data before pushing it onto a Windows system. I've got a Sun Ultra 5 here running OpenBSD as my firewall/fileserver/webmail system and once per week I tar/gzip my user's home directories into backup files and then a scheduled task on a Win2k box collects them at 4am via scp for the weekly backup to DVD+RW.

If you're serious about connecting Windows systems to UNIX systems, look at Microsoft's Services for UNIX (SFU). You may find the NFS server/client features useful for interchanging files if you're not on-board with SSH.

Hmm... I'm trying to run ufsdump on a small directory structure, just to test if it works, but it requires that I specify a blocking factor. And according to the man pages, the blocking factor should be dependent on the tape density.

Since I want to scp a backup of the unix machine onto the Win2k machine (and then onto a REV drive), is it possible to create a reliable backup just by bypassing the dump step and creating a tar/gzip of the root directory? Or will that just create something horrible that I can't use?

Also, does the fact that the server is running Oracle 8 complicate the matter even further? It seems that Oracle has its own file system and backup strategy for the database itself. Am I correct?

I am just getting to learn UNIX (Solaris) and discovered this site 24 hours ago and I love every minute of it. Good questions and good responses, short and concise etc. and the site is a terrific "organic" learning tool.

My immediate question to Pressy is how the hell do you type an inverted '?' question mark as in his comment about 70 gig disks being thrid party for Ultra 60.

cheers,
Subbarao