To copy, or not to copy, the Solaris kernel and how.

[630111]

One of my DBAs thinks it would be a good idea to make a copy of the kernel and put it somewhere, maybe as a nightly/weekly/monthly cron job or as hardware changes are made. Does anyone have an opinion to offer, and what
file(s) would I copy (in case I lose the arguement)? I mentioend that we do tape backups on these machines, but he'd like the additional safety.
Thanks, in advance!

 

[lfoata]

You could do OS mirroring with disksuite, or else copy the boot disk using the dd command.
You could also go to

http://www.backupcentral.com,

they have a good free utility for your needs. Too bad I.T. is not cash business

Luc Foata
Unix sysadmin, Oracle DBA

 

[mikeclark]

We do nightly full data backups but also a seperate job on another server does a nightly ufsdump of the system partitians of all the servers.
There is not much point having fancy backup software if you don't have a dump of the OS including the backup software, so you can restore your backups.