It appears that this question is a common one. The answer is
fairly simple. First, the original question:
> DUdes,
>
> Has anyone successfully run vdump to a remote tape drive? I
> would like to dump my root and usr filesystems ( these happen to
> be UFS) from my 3000 to an Alpha Server 2100 which has a TZ867
> local. I know I could just use rdump in this particular case, since
> my source FS is UFS, but I'm actually doing some firmware/OS
> upgrade self-training on my 3000 before attempt the same on the
> critical 2100 systems. Both of the OS's are DU 3.0.
The answer is basically to run the vdump command on the
tapeclient system with the output sent to stdout. The stdout is
then piped to a remote shell running a dd command to it's
local tape device. You will need to specify the block size for the
whole thing though. It's funny.. the man page for vdump (DU 3.0)
says that the default BS is 60k. I found that mine defaulted to 64k.
Just to keep it safe, I specified the Block Size on both the vdump
AND the dd.
The vrestore works in reverse fashion, but the pseudo-shell that the
interactive option of vrestore invokes will not work with an rsh. A full
partition vrestore without the -i, will work with rsh, though. What I did
to test out an interactive vrestore that DID work, was to export the
applicable partition on my tapeclient, NFS mount (R/W) that partition
on my tapehost, and then vrestore interactively while in my NFS
mounted directory. It worked fine. Here's the vdump command that I
used to vdump my root partition:
tapeclient# /sbin/vdump -0 -C -u -b 64 -f - / | /usr/bin/rsh tapehost \
/sbin/dd of=/dev/nrmt0h bs=64k
Thanks to the following:
Cliff Krieger
Matt White
Christophe DIARRA
alan_at_nabeth.cxo.dec.com
Dejan Muhamedagic
P.S. Just a tip - All of you who use NSR ( Network Save & Restore ),
I recommend that you perform a full,level 0 vdump of your root and usr
filesystems (this includes /var) on a regular basis. This will allow you
to get back your old core system along with the nsr directories and
indexes. You can then use NSR from there.
Wayne Sweatt
Litton/PRC
Santa Fe, NM
Received on Tue Mar 11 1997 - 18:37:57 NZDT