Re: Disaster recovery, network based tape storage

[shane stixrud org]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Dominic Rivera wrote:

> I'm looking for comments and suggestions on how to perform this
> operation for a bare metal restore in my disaster recovery planning.
> 
> Currently, I'm using NetBackup 5.0, all backups are kept on a
> netbackup server which is accessable via the network.
> 
> What I *think* the process should look like is this.
> 
> 0. <bonk> total server failure, new hardware brought in
> 1. Boot from rescue cd that has NetBackup 5.0 Client installed.
> 2. Recreate all partitions and logical volumes, configure backup client.
> 3. Use alternate path recovery to restore / and /boot partitions.
> 4. chroot into the newly recovered root.
> 5. Install grub & reboot.
> 6. Restore remaining data. 

Sigh, what I would like is something a bit more instructional.  I just 
hate the idea of using full system backups, yes you can recover but  
you have no idea as to the steps required to get RHEL back to its present 
state.  I accept that backups are required for "live data" i.e. databases, 
non static config data etc... But everything else really should be solved 
using an automated installation / configuration engine like kickstart. My 
main complaints with this approach is that kickstarts %prep and %post 
sections require the user to pick their scripting/programming lang of 
choice and design a unique script per server, I would prefer a more 
structured approach.  The other issue I have is determining exactly what 
updates were applied on the old server, it would be nice if I could kick 
off a up2date --restore at the end of my %post, even better would be for 
RHN to maintain and install .rpmsaves config files for all rpm packages :) 

Cheers,
Shane

-- 
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