Flash Archives on a bootable DVD

[mrberry]

I am trying to create a flash archive on a bootable DVD for disaster recovery purposes. I have referenced several docs including the Sun Flash Archive guide and Sun Blueprints for "Jumstart Technology" and "Building a Bootable DVD to Deploy a Solaris Flash Archive".

My initial problem was that my flash archive image was larger than the space on a DVD, but I managed to pair it down to just over 3GB. However, mkisofs which is used to create an iso9660 format for a DVD does not support files over 2GB in size.

I looked a ways of perhaps splitting the flash archive so that I could span multiple DVD's an install from this, but could not find any documentation on this.

Another alternative is to perhaps boot from a a Solaris install CDROM and then install from the flash archive. But I cannot see how to do this - in only seems to allow you to do a flash archive install from a locally attached tape, which I do not have available.

Has anyone done what I am trying to do an overcome these problems or have any suggestions? Does anyone know of some doc that explains how to do what I want to do?

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have just over a week to our DR exersize and need a resolution to this.

 

[mrberry]

No takers?

Well I scraped using the Flash Archive utility because it doesn't suit my purposes; it does a sys-unconfig and wipes out several system files that I need.

Instead I used a modified version of a procedure I found on BigAdmin that creates a bootable DVD with compressed ufsdump backups. I was able to successfully test the procedure, but it is really slow to restore so I am considering scrapping the whole DVD thing and just restoring from LTO tape.