On Tuesday 26 December 2006 15:57, David Boyes wrote: > > > 1. A snapshot of your hard disk configuration. > > 2. A copy of your current Bacula file daemon that can be run on > > a rescue system (i.e. probably statically linked). > > 3. A bunch of scripts that can be used to do various recovery tasks > > (bring up the network, repartition your hard disks as they were, > reformat > > your > > hard disks, ...). Obviously you would use only those scripts that are > > really > > necessary. > > 4. All sorts of binaries to make recovery easy. > > 5. All this put together with your current kernel on a CDROM that can > be > > booted. > > [..snip..] > > The path I am exploring for the moment is simply packaging the output > from > > items 1-4 onto tar file that the user can save to a floppy or a CDROM. > I > > am > > also considering the possibility of remastering rescue disks and > adding > > the > > Bacula data, but that is probably also a black hole of distro > dependent > > code ... > > > > If anyone has some better ideas, I would appreciate it to hear them > ... > > It would be really handy if the FD saved the above tar file as a normal > part of the backup run (would only be a few KB, so negligible amount of > extra work/data to transfer). I'm not so convinced that maintaining > partitioning data is all that useful any more -- when's the last time > you replaced a disk with an identical size disk? -- but it can't hurt.
Yes, I think that is a good idea. First, though, we must create such a tar file, which doesn't currently exist as such. If you load and run the rescue make, it will exist as a directory. Over the next few days, I am going to delete all the old stuff that tried to build a bootable CDROM and just stick to providing the tar file. After that, I think the user can handle backing it up (by for example sticking it in his Bacula scripts directory), and the user can handle getting it onto a CD or onto the Knoppix CD. There is a *big* advantage in maintaining the partitioning data. First it can be used to reformat an existing disk if the disk is not bad. Second, even if you have a different sized disk, it serves as a good template. I have many different configurations of partitioning depending on the use (server, file server, development, laptop), and by having that data handy when something goes wrong at least I can easily see what I had before the crash. As you say, the total amount of data is rather small -- the whole thing including the Bacula FD binary on my current system is 1,208 KB -- hardly a problem on any medium. > > I've had very good luck with restoring Unix/Linux clients using a > Knoppix CD as the recovery CD. It has a bacula-fd package (albeit 1.36 > vintage), and they go to great lengths to detect and handle hardware, > LVM and RAID detection and all the other hard stuff. Boot the Knoppix > CD, tell it where to find the Bacula SD and Dir in your config, and the > client id it's supposed to be using, do a full restore to the > replacement disk, and then do whatever you need to do for that distro to > make the replacement disk bootable. If you use grub, then there are text > and GUI tools on the Knoppix CD to handle that for you once you have > your grub config file accessible again. Yes Knoppix is a good solution. > > I haven't tried recovering a Windows system yet, but I suspect it > shouldn't be too different, at least because I use grub to boot my (few) > Windows boxen as well. It's too bad my OS/2 TSM standalone restore CD no > longer works on modern versions of Windows -- there were some good ideas > there. A number of people have hand good experiences with BartPE. > > Key tricky bit is reconstructing the client ID and pwd string if you use > strong passwords and don't record them somewhere. A server-side client > data access ACL (eg, client X is allowed to access client Y's data) > might be a useful thing to think about for the future. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
