AIX 5.2 mksysb

[THEaix]

Anyone have a way to get around the 2day mksysb to dvd? Looking to clone a 615 with two vg's (root & user) to another 615.

 

[hfaix]

Your mksysb on this system takes 2 days? Wow... you must have a ton on rootvg.

 

[THEaix]

Well 2 days is a little stretch. OK hourssssssssssss. do a mksysb to dvd spans 2 dvd's and does take hours. I had heard of someone doing them to NFS mount but not sure of that process

 

[khalidaaa]

It can be done if you have NIM master somewhere on the network! But why are you using DVDs? IMHO Tapes are faster!

Regards,
Khalid

 

[THEaix]

Well like a Duma I ordered the *&$* things (2 P570's 4 615's)without tape thinking that a higher state of the art device would be better. Ya know no one ever mentioned that the frikin things were slower that old people ...........!

I told my bos that we may need to put tape on all of them the other day.

 

[hfaix]

How big is rootvg? "lsvg rootvg

 

[THEaix]

32GB

 

[RodKnowlton]

More importantly, how much space is used in the rootvg filesystems?

lsvg -l rootvg |\
 awk '($NF ~ /^\//) { print $NF }' |\
 xargs df -Pm |\
 awk '{used += $3} END{print "Total space used: "used" MB\n"}'

- Rod



IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert pSeries and AIX 5L
CompTIA Linux+
CompTIA Security+

A Simple Code for Posting on the Web

 

[RodKnowlton]

You also might want to use the script just down to the "df -Pm" (including it) to identify all of the filesystems in rootvg.

If there are any large non-system filesystems living there, you can add them to /etc/exclude.rootvg to leave them off of the mksysb.

Of course you need to be sure then to back the excluded filesystem up some other way (provided you care about its contents. ).

- Rod


IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert pSeries and AIX 5L
CompTIA Linux+
CompTIA Security+

A Simple Code for Posting on the Web

 

[THEaix]

Total space used: 6551.73 MB

 

[THEaix]

I am using the exclude.rootvg. I can do a mksysb using the mkcd command (3+ DVD's) but when I use the mkdvd it dies with the unformated /unreadable media msgs. When I try and do a udfcreate it is unable to do that. I had also saw but can't remeber the thread where someone had changed the block size writing to the DVD to 200000, If someone knows that command or nows the thread...........

 

[cts123]

My suggestion would be, try to reduce the size less than 4.7GB , ( by moving unnecessary files from /tmp) so that you can accommodate the space in a single DVD.

Find out the file systems which are not associated with OS. You can add them in /etc/exclude.rootvg and start the mksysb backup.

I use following route instead of using direct smitty mkcd
as i have faced couple of problems while writing to DVD.

smitty
|
system storage Management
|
System Backup Manager
|
Back Up the System
|
Back Up This System to DVD
|
Use an existing mksysb image? < no >
|
DVD backup media format? < ISO9660 >
or
UDF (Universal Disk Format)


You should be fine with single DVD and take mksysb.

In my case the output of the script ( from - Rod )..the output of rootvg Total used space is showing = 12 GB

But I took mksysb in single DVD.

here is the /etc/exclude.rootvg of my machine.
./mkcd/mksysb_image
./mkcd/cd_images
./mkcd/cd_fs
/u01

Regards,
Sam

 

[THEaix]

Thanks, to everyone. Looks like I may have a bad DVD drive. Works on one server but not the other. Here is a script that I had found on this forum that changes the transfr size of the writes.

rmdev -l cd0; chdev -l cd0 -a max_transfer=0x200000; cfgmgr -l cd0

With excluding the users file systems that are in the rootvg got it on 1 DVD, but it still took hours. I started it are 2pm and I left for the day a little after 5 and it was still running but was complete w/ no errors the next day.

Still may put tapes on them, or go with the NIM server to store and boot from. The DVD's seem to need more care and are expensive since I do a mksysb every other day( I've had tape errors once and the other copy saved me).