On Wednesday 27 December 2006 12:15, James Harper wrote: > > > Is there any reason that it can't be on the tape and restored first > up > > > as part of the DR process? > > > > That would be having the cart before the horse. The snapshot of the > hard > > disk configuration is to be able to reconfigure a broken hard disk or > > configure a replacement disk. Until you have a configured disk there > is > > no way to do a restore. This information must be on a floppy or a > CDROM > > or you must manually reconstruct it. > > I was assuming that bextract could be used to do it. Being slow wouldn't > matter if it was the first thing backed up on the tape. Being error > prone might be a bit of a downer though.
> Do you think it would be > capable of reliably restoring a few kb of config info? Yes, without doubt. > Murphy's law > applied to disaster recovery states that the disaster will occur shortly > after you have made some major change to the system but shortly before > you have updated your disaster recovery media. Having it on tape would > resolve this. > > I've just re-read the docs and noticed that bextract can't restore ACL > info. This breaks my idea of using it to restore enough to get a running > system, as do your comments about it being error prone. > > Do you think there would be value in having a bextract tool that could > reliably do a full restore? Perhaps. I see certain advantages, and if it interests you, I encourage you to work on it. I prefer for the moment to concentrate on getting the client restore working. > It would certainly make disaster recovery a > lot easier! > > > A full disaster recovery plan from bare metal is *very* complex. I'm > only > > trying to address the problem of getting a single client machine back > up. > > The same principles may apply to the larger problem, but I cannot even > get > > a > > client machine back up, so for the moment until I find a good > solution, I > > need to keep the problem simple. > > I just did the single client version today using dfsbuild (+ some > patching I had to do), without any of the automated partitioning stuff > of course... It was only mildly painful. Just today, I succeeded in getting my latest Bacula rescue code working again -- at least on my SuSE 10.2 system. So at least for me the main problem is resolved, and I have the equivalent or better than the last Bacula rescue CDROM, so I feel better about making the 1.40 Bacula release now. > > <snip> > > > bextract is a last resort solution one wants to use only if one has > not > > been > > careful to do a proper disaster planning. It is *very* slow and prone > to > > error. It is much better to read the Restore chapter and learn how to > > recover with restore without bextract. > > I had greatly overestimated the power of bextract. As I mentioned above, > is there any reason why this couldn't be improved? If bextract could > restore the system to a bootable point, then all the problems of > bootstrapping and getting a runnable director and sd go away... The > server problem is pretty much reduced to the size of the client problem, > with the exception of tape device drivers (which is minor if they are > standard kernel drivers). I haven't really looked at the code, but if > bextract isn't using the fd and sd codebases directly and you are > keeping them in sync manually then I can see that this would be a lot of > extra effort. bextract being a stand alone program uses some of the Bacula libraries, but unfortunately there seems to be some differences between the client restore code and bextracts. I don't know exactly why, and I am not very happy about it, but fixing it is not very high on my personal priority list. It would make a good project for someone though ... > > > > No matter what distro-centric tools you used to make your > > > partition+md+lvm setup, they can all be reconstructed in a generic > way, > > > unless there's something somewhere that I don't know... > > > > Well, for the moment, I am stopped by my ignorance of the boot process > > because > > I am unable to make a boot CDROM containing Bacula files that boot. > So I > > am > > dead in the water. > > I don't know what distro you prefer, but dfsbuild should work for Debian > (it doesn't under etch though, needs some patching, see my recent bug > reports against it). I can supply some patches if Debian is your distro > of choice and you are using etch. > > Otherwise, maybe customise knoppix? I now have a custom Bacula, which in theory is more or less (probably much less) generic ... > > > > I'd also love to be able to use the generic Linux CD ROM to restore > a > > > Windows system from 'bare metal'... this would open up a huge market > to > > > Bacula (not sure if you'd want a large swarm of Windows Newbies > suddenly > > > appearing on the mailing list though... :). The new ntfs driver > (ntfs-3g > > > or something) needs to mature a bit, and Bacula would need a bit of > work > > > to allow restoring the ACL's and other information to it, but I > don't > > > see anything impossible about doing this, except for the final step > of > > > making the windows system bootable again... > > > > I'm not convinced that a "generic" Linux CDROM will solve the problems > of > > restore on Windows unless you restore an image. To properly restore a > > Windows machine, you need to run the Bacula Windows client, and it > runs > > only under Windows and not under Linux. > > True. I was referring to a point in the future where the ntfs-3g driver > had matured a bit. At that point you should be able to build an ntfs > filesystem under Linux and restore the files. The only problem then is > making it bootable. As it is now, it might still work but will be > missing all sorts of acl info. I'm going to try it out shortly though. > > > > Finally, has anyone ever thought of creating a Bacula distribution? > > > (Baculix? Bacubian? Bachat? Bacpix? :). It could be installed on a > box > > > with a lot of disk and a tape drive and run D2D2T style backups a-la > > > Tivoli and the like. A user interface could be provided to allow > users > > > to restore files to their workstations too, instead of bugging the > > > admin. It also means that even in a windows environment, the > director > > > and sd are still on a linux box where they belong :) > > > > I think that already exists. Just load any modern distribution > (Fedora, > > RedHat, SuSE, ...), load Bacula, build it, configure it, and you have > a > > Director and a Storage daemon that can handle a whole network. With > > version > > 1.39.x you can now also do the same thing on a Windows Server. > > Of course, but you need to know a bit about Linux to do it. I was > dreaming about something like openfiler which is more or less boot and > go. Not a priority in any way of course given the other things going on. In general it is not hard to boot and go, but to do that you need hard disks pre-partitioned and formatted, and you need a backup image rather than file backups as Bacula does -- or a tape that contains a Full backup. If you write data to tapes as Bacula does with Full, Diff, and Inc backups and you are backing up 50-2000 workstations, then life is much more complex, and in general it requires some sys admin to intervene and decide what is going where. One time I stupidly did something like: rm -rf xxx. * while running as root and cd'ed into the root directory. My rescue disk very quickly allowed me to restore the 500 or so damaged files to my system which was no longer bootable (/boot was gone and a good part of /lib was gone). The Bacula rescue disk is good at that. It isn't so good as a one button restore in a disaster recovery situation. However, over time, we may get there especially if some users such as yourself take and interest in the problem. Regards, Kern ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. 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