Re: OS Recovery

From: Michael Vilain (vilain@spamcop.net)
Date: 04/10/03 

From: "Michael Vilain <vilain@spamcop.net>"
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 08:47:57 -0700

In article <pan.2003.04.10.07.31.28.571340@bellatlantic.net>,
 "Santosh K. Nair" <sknair@bellatlantic.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Apr 2003 01:56:19 -0400, Mark wrote:
>
> >
> > Certainly what you proposed is also a valid disk mirroring strategy. The
> > majority of the servers I support have two internal SCSI boot disks that
> > are manually mirrored and then all of the user data / apps are stored on
> > the SAN.
>
> Just to make my point clear that I'm not looking for a mechanism to
> recover from a failed disk...that's what mirroring is for (?). My
> requirements are that I need to be able to create a tape, which would
> contain enough information to recreate the machine from scratch. It
> seems that on Sun, there is no such product that works with DiskSuite (?)
> Which begs the question, just how useful is DiskSuite?
>
> I am primarily worried about the OS and its supporting data...the
> user data/apps are stored on our SAN and is already protected.

Not possible, sorry. The standard approach that SUN uses is to:

- install media for a base system, including ODS
- install Solaris via CD or network
- install and configure DiskSuit
   [don't know what you do for Solaris 9,
   but I expect you can skip this step]
- configure volumes per your saved system configuration
- restore from backup tapes or software

Veritas sells a product called "Bare Metal Restore" and there's a a
mksysb clone floating around but it doesn't work with ODS nor will it
produce a bootable tape.

Although ODS keeps the volume configurations on a filesystem that's
backed up, it still requires you to configure the volumes prior to
restore. I haven't tried restoring a system disk from tape and
rebooting. I expect that not to work.

Sorry, there's no easy fix here unless you want to roll your own
solution. 

-- 
DeeDee, don't press that button!  DeeDee!  NO!  Dee...