My original question was advice on how to restore a crashed system disk,
when my backup is at a remote location. I was particularly interested in
burning a CD of the system disk.
Thanks to rapid responses from
James Sainsbury
Ian Mortimer
Lyndon Handy
Jim Belonis
Steve Smith
Selden E Ball jnr
William J Bochnik
Dr Tom Blinn.
The opinions were mainly split between having a hot, or recent copy, standby
disk (James, Steve, Lyndon and William) or booting off the original
installation CD (Ian, Jim and Tom). Lyndon also suggested the use of Veritas
Net backup and Seldon suggested RIS, both of which I will check into.
Tom issued a caution
"There are all kinds of things on the running system's disk that try to do
things like turn on swap that aren't going to work from a CDROM. And you
don't really want to start the X window system, for example."
but also suggested that I may be able to work with btcreate to get something
happening.
At the moment, I am backing up 14 systems and the majority of these are
already fully loaded with drives, so the option of creating a swappable
drive for each system would also have to include expansion units. Being a
regional Uni, the budget won't stretch for this option. I am currently
playing with the installation CD, to see what sort of restore times I can
get.
By chance, a summary came in on the list today from Robert Honore-
Summary:Using a rewriteable CDROM drive on TRU64 Unix. Which also offers
some solutions worth reading if these options are being considered.
Once again, thanks to all for your advice and the time put into your
responses.
Regards, John
John Gormley
Senior Unix Sytems Administrator
Southern Cross University
Lismore NSW
AUSTRALIA
jgormley_at_scu.edu.au
Received on Wed Nov 08 2000 - 22:37:53 NZDT