RE: Disaster recovery for my Redhat 6.2

[Anurag Jalan <a_jalan vsnl com>]

Karl,

Thanks for the timely response ! You have put me on the right path ......!!!

Regards

Anurag


----
At 12:34 PM 7/28/00 -0600, you wrote:
>I've made my living in disaster recovery for the past decade on Unix systems
>and have come up with a reasonable, IMHO, plan for recovering after a
>significant crash where the disks are trashed.
>
>The principle is that you re-install the OS from scratch mimicking as
>closely as possible the setup of filesystems, or making improvements you
>couldn't while the system was up. To do this effectively, you need to keep a
>copy of a df -k so you can see what was where. If you are very picky that
>everything gets back exactly as it was, you might wish to do a tree of your
>filesystems. That's the extra mile, however, and my experience has shown
>that there's almost always a better way to setup filesystems because after
>experiencing your system for a while, you see things you wish you would have
>done a little differently.
>
>After the restore of the OS, you then selectively restore etc files,
>including conf files, inittab, passwd, rc files, etc. to a filesystem that
>will hold them. From there, you verify that nothing in, for example,
>inittab, will make the system unbootable if it's included. This is pretty
>easy on Linux because the inittab is kept pretty vanilla. That's definitely
>not the case on other Unix systems.
>
>I think you get the idea from this, that you don't just do a wholesale
>restore of the entire backup. For this reason, I keep a backup of the entire
>system on one tape, performed weekly, then do separate filesystems nightly.
>I include changing data filesystems in the nightly backup. I also include
>/home in case any of my users have made changes to their .profile-like files
>(.bash_profile, .bashrc, etc.). I try to make the lives of the users as
>secure as possible, but I don't tell them that 8^}. I don't want them to get
>cocky.
>
>I also include the major applications in the nightly backup. Not because
>they change very much, but because I then know that I can restore config
>files if necessary. With many applications, especially RDBMS systems, you
>will have to re-install so the links and the pseudo kernel files they need
>are compiled appropriately. If you know the applications well enough, you
>know what to restore specifically so you don't have to restore everything.
>One reason I backup everything in the application areas is because I'm sure
>the vendor doesn't tell me everything I need to know to be confident I'm
>backing up exactly what I need and no more. I've had occasion to be told by
>a vendor support engineer that I need a file that hadn't been backed up. I
>learned my lesson on that.
>
>I hope this gives you some idea what the process might be for recovery from
>a system crash. Just hope it's not the disks (or the disk controllers which
>have a way of corrupting data on good disks as the go down), then all you
>have to do is replace the bad part and reboot.
>
>Karl L. Pearson
>Senior uniVerse Database Analyst
>Senior Unix/NT/Win Analyst
>karlp colubs com
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Anurag Jalan [mailto:a_jalan vsnl com]
>Sent: Friday, July 28, 2000 12:37 PM
>To: redhat-install-list redhat com
>Subject: Disaster recovery for my Redhat 6.2
>
>
>Hi all,
>
>I take regular backups with taper ( Full .. about 2.0 GB ) to my HP SCSI
>dat drive........In this manner..*everything* except the contents of /tmp
>is backed up...
>
>I would like to know... how best to restore my present system in case of
>a HD crash or something ........
>
>I run SAMBA, WWW ( compiled with MySQL & PHP ), FTP, Sendmail/Fetchmail
>and a few other services.........
>
>any pointers would be very welcome............
>
>Oh yes.. i have the boot & rescue disks ready...
>
>Regards
>
>Anurag
>
>
>
>--
>To unsubscribe: mail redhat-install-list-request redhat com with
>"unsubscribe" as the Subject.
>
>
>-- 
>To unsubscribe: mail redhat-install-list-request redhat com with
>"unsubscribe" as the Subject.
>
>
>