Please suggest how to back-up and restore aix/solaris/hp-ux servers.

[SimonM]

Hello,

I have been asked to develop a procedure for routinely restoring our teaching servers (4x AIX, 6x Solaris, 4x HP-UX) regularly. What we´d like to do is have a good disk image of the root directory which we can restore simply. Apart from the operating system we have only a few programmes which we keep in /usr/.... The challenge is to create a restore system that simply involves a few commands that anybody could do. If we had a good image (and an easy way to do things) it would simpler to re-image the machines rather than trying to clean them up after a week or two of class work.

On our NT machines and Windows machines we use Norton Ghost and have a couple of standard software sets on CDR which we use and/or an image on the D drive (a partition). We can re-image a whole classroom with very little effort.

I have read a little about DD and mksysb but I am unsure about how to go about things as I am new to unix - Mac background ;-). Any suggestions welcome. Thanks.

SimonM.

 

[MikeLacey]

There's an hpux product called IgniteUX which HP use at their teaching site near Bracknell in the uk.

I trashed my machine (corrupted rootvg) and it was restored in 20 mins -- v impressive.

There's also a free patch to hpux 10.20 which contains make_recover, similar functionality to aix's mksysb

The Sun version is, I think, called Jump Start but I've never used it.

It's a shame you have such a mix of machines, makes it unlikely that it will be cost effective to get the hp and sun products.

Ok -- suggestions.

mksysb and make_recover sound like the way to go for the aix abd hp boxes, they only restore the root volume group but, with such a small number of machines, it should not be much trouble to have a script on the root volume that restores the others from the next bit of the mksysb/make_recover tape. I wouldn't bother with dd myself, just sam and smit to make the backups.

Mike
michael.j.lacey@ntlworld.com

http://www.cargill.com/