Creating a backup CD 1

[columb]

My 'playbox' has no tape drive so I need a bootable CD mksysb to restore it back to a suitable starting point whenever I've finished breaking it. What would be realy nice is to have a cd that lives in the drive so that I just type

bootlist -m normal cd0
shutdown -Fr

and everything is restored to the original state.

I'm pretty close. I've looked long and hard at bosinst.data to try to set the relevant parameters. Within the control_flow stanza I've set
CONSOLE = tty0 to prevent the prompt for the console
PROMPT = no to automate the install
RUN_STARTUP = no to prevent the smit type screen that appears at first boot.

And there's the problem. I still get the smit style bit at the first boot. This means I have to go down to the data centre and press F10 on the console.

I guess I should be putting something in CUSTOMIZATION_FILE but I don'e know what.

Any hints tips, or complete solutions would be gratefully received.

Thanks

Columb Healy

 

[FrankieAIX]

Columb,

If you have a CD-Burner attached to your play box you can make a CD Mksysb... Or if you do not, make a mksysb flat file, send that to another box with a CD-Burner and then you can turn that flat mksysb file into a bootable file to boot from CD..

Cheers!


-FrankieAIX

 

[columb]

Frankie

That's not the problem. I'm creating CDs like theyre going out of style. The issue is what I need to amend to make the bootable CD restore without manual intervention. I've been RTFM at this IBM site and I've done as they've recommended. I still get the firstboot process.

What I'm investigating now is rewiting /usr/sbin/fbcheck to stop it running! - it is after all a play box.

Columb Healy

 

[columb]

Just in case anyone is interested I've got this working.

The relevant steps were
[ol]
[li]Edit /bosinst.data as per this IBM site[/li]
[li]Create the file /save_bosinst.data as per the mksysb man page[/li]
[li]Edit the script /usr/sbin/fbcheck to stop it running first boot.[/li]
[li]Use mkcd to create a bootable CD[/li]
[li] put CD in server drive[/li]
[li] whenever I want to rebuild I run

bootlist -m normal cd0; shutdown -Fr

[/li]
[/ol]

I now have a machine I can rebuild back to a standard build without needing to revisit it. This is particularly useful for my 'playbox' as I now always know what I'm starting from

Columb Healy