On Friday 29 December 2006 16:45, Christopher DeMarco wrote: > 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. Yes, you are using the old rescue code. My latest version in the CVS corrects both of these problems. > > 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 always drop the user into a shell now. It is much simpler. > > 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. Yes, but unfortunately, it is a 1.36.x FD if I remember right, which *may* be OK with a current Bacula Director/SD (maybe not), but probably will not do very well with the likes of ACLs and all the new stuff that has been added to Volumes since 1.36.x. > 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? Bacula rescue has a lot over Knoppix for doing disaster recovery. Read the Disaster Recovery chapter of the development manual -- it explains why. In saying that, I'm not at all knocking Knoppix. It is an excellent LiveCD. Bacula restore *is* a script and the manual (at least the development manual does) explains how you can create a directory to put on anyone else's LiveCD if you so desire. Generally I find that LiveCDs are not made to be easily modifiable, which is why I tried to provide an alternative letting you take or leave whatever part you want. Since there are now tons of LiveCD distros and much more documentation, perhaps the picture is changing. > > > > 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? Yes, of course. I would be extremely happy if someone would document this and submit it to the project. Three years ago when I started the recovery project Knoppix and Tomsrtb were about the only things around and there was little or no documentation on remastering them. Today things are different, and I would be happy to get out of the boot CD business. > > > (ps: Kern, you rock. Bacula is awesome.) > Thanks, and thanks for taking an interest in this problem ... ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
