I just found Scott / Kern's little thread re: bare metal restore; here is my report from having battled with it for ~2 weeks:
The first problem I encountered is that the initrd is an ext2 fs,
which is no longer built into most distros' kernels. Apparently
everybody's using initramfs. I rebuilt my kernel and the initrd
worked fine.
Second problem: inittab is hard-coded for mingetty; my distro defaults
to getty. apt-get install mingetty and I'm off and running.
Third problem: mingetty seems to encounter a broken PAM. It reads the
username but restarts before asking for a password. I sidestepped
this issue by booting to single-user mode.
I finally abandoned this tack upon finding that the module for my NIC
wasn't loadable. Now, I take full blame: this test client is a VMWare
instance, and my kernel build process wasn't totally kosher -- but
still I've grown worried that the entire process is too messy for
production use.
So I downloaded the latest KNOPPIX, which includes a bacula-fd. My
plan for today is to setup some complicated real-world-ish md + LVM
clients, and try to script a reasonable sfdisk-->mdadm-->lvscan-->mkfs
process for ultimately testing bare metal restore using KNOPPIX.
I had a TON of fun fixing the restore cd and I learned a lot. But
ultimately the goal is to get bare-metal working ASAP -- so I will use
whatever gets me there fastest.
--> Why is the Bacula restore disc a sovereign project and not a
--> document/script/whatever for helping folks boot from somebody else's
--> livecd and then doing a restore from there? What does a Bacula-owned
--> livecd get us over e.g. KNOPPIX?
The bare-metal restore process works as follows:
partition --> md? --> LVS? --> mkfs --> bconsole
Restoring the filesystems is the only part that's client-specific.
Rather than trying to anticipate and account for all of the possible
combinations of config that people might have, wouldn't it be easier
to document how to script it yourself?
1. To prepare for a bare-metal restore, first you create a script
sfdisk --> mdadm --> lvscan --> mount --> mkfs.
2. Put this script somewhere on the Bacula director, along with
your bacula-fd.conf.
3. When it's time to restore, boot KNOPPIX. Start your network,
pull down the script from #1. Run the script.
4. Chroot
5. Restore
6. Setup grub/LILO
The restore process is already this complicated, but instead of
fighting to create a custom restore cd as step #0, we're leveraging
the work that KNOPPIX has already done.
I'll report further as I make progress.
Thoughts?
(ps: Kern, you rock. Bacula is awesome.)
--
Christopher DeMarco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Alephant Systems (http://alephant.net)
PGP public key at http://pgp.alephant.net
+1-412-708-9660
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