Backing up Solaris 9 with RAID

[AndyCLee]

Hi all,

I'm new to Solaris and as such am having great difficulties working out how to back up the operating system. I thought I understood from my trusty book and created level 0 ufsdumps of my RAID 1 system disks and also my RAID 5 data disks. All was going well (or at least I thought it was) until one day Solaris died - proabaly due to my tinkering. But I didn't worry too much as I had everything backed up onto tape. I simply had to restore it. When I restored from tape and attempted to boot, Solaris complained that it couldn't find any State Database Replicas - is this the parity information? If so of course it couldn't find it as they didn't exist!! Solris then refused to boot.

I had to go back to a previous backup which I took before any RAID was implemented. This restored without any problems. I then had to implement RAID again. and update the system to reflect any changes made after this backup was created.

Could somebody please tell me how Solaris 9 with RAID should be backed up. Ideally I would like to back up the OS and data to tapes and simply restore everything and be up and running within a couple of hours.

As you can no doubt tell I'm very new to this so as much explanation as possible would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Andy

 

[kHz]

Mostly the Solaris Volume Manager, if you really want to call it that, is worth about as much as a used Yugo. After your first restore you would have had to boot from a cdrom and change the /etc/system and /etc/vfstab files to not use SVM and clear the state database replicas that were hosed. Then recreate the state database replicas and complete your mirrors.

In AIX a mksysb would handle all of this for you and you wouldn't have so much confounded #@!* to go through.

Unfortunately the world doesn't run on AIX or I would be working on that OS again instead of Solaris.

 

[dandan123]

KHz,

Could you elaborate on what to change in /etc/system and /etc/vfstab and also how to clear the state database replicas ?

Once the replicas are hosed if you use the metadb command it says no replicas found so how would you go about clearing them ?

 

[coffeysm]

Remove all /dev/md/dsk and /dev/md/rdsk references in /etc/vfstab. There is also some stuff in /etc/system there should be comments where the software makes changes. Also metadb -d /dev/dsk/some_slice I think will clear them out..