Creating bootable Solaris CD for NetBackup bare metal restores

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Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 03:59:33 -0800
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org

Hello.

I'm trying to improve my DR methods and decided that it would be nice to
have a bootable Solaris CD that I could use as a NetBackup client in the
event that I needed to do a full bare metal restore. I can't get the
money for the Bare Metal Restore NetBackup extension, and I don't like
the jumpstart/netboot options.

To create the CD I modified the methods mentioned in John Howard's
"Building a Bootable Jumpstart Installtion CD-ROM" Sun Blueprint
article. He covered Solaris 2.6, which involved modifying slice 0 of
the CD, I'm using Solaris8 which involves modifying slice 1. My method
is basically this:

1) Mount the CD and record the partition sizes via prtvtoc
2) Use dd to copy off the s0, s2, s3, s4, and s5 partitions using a 512 bs.
3) Copy off s1 to an alternate location. (I'm using tar)
4) Install the NetBackup client (3.2GA for compatability) into the s1
copy, making sure to symlink out files that need to be rw, such as the
bp.conf, etc, etc.
5) Use mkisofs to create the image of s1:
mkisofs -R -d -L -l -o /path/to/s1.img /path/to/s1
6) Check the size of the image in 512 blocks and then check that number
against the size of the partition.
7) Use dd to write zeros into a file that is the size of the diff
between the partition size and the iso (#5) size
8) Cat the iso and the pad together (iso first naturally) to get the
full slice
9) Double check the size of s1 to ensure it is exactly the size of the
partition
10) Cat each partition together from 0 to 5 into a completed ISO
11) Burn that ISO and attempt to boot.

So far 2 attempts at this have failed. I think I got the slice 1 size
wrong the first time, so I refined my procedure into the above.
However, while it seems like this should work I'm getting errors when I
try to boot it. It doesn't even find the kernel.

For reference, I'm using the Solaris8 Install Disk, not Software 1, as
it looked like a better canidate.

Has anyone done this sort of thing before? Any points that can be
passed my way would be extremely helpful.
Furthermore, if anyone has used a bootable CD for restores before and
found that it wasn't all it's cracked up
to be, feel free to save me the trouble of getting this CD running.

benr.
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