It is supposed to work, though I haven't tried it.
Gary Gendel wrote:
Here is the problem I'm trying to solve...
Ive been using a sparc machine as my primary home server for years. A few years
back the motherboard died. I did a nightly backup on an external USB drive
formatted in ufs format. I use a rsync based backup called dirvish, so I
thought I had all the bases covered. I basically mount the USB drive, do the
backup, and then unmount the drive. This guarantees that (except while it's
mounted) the backup filesystem is relatively safe from glitches.
I quickly brought up an x86 machine but found it couldn't read the ufs drive
(endian issue). I tried Linux which claims it could read either endian ufs
without success.
So, I picked up another sparc machine to get me up and running again. However,
I'm now in the same boat if it dies.
Now I need to downgrade the sparc machine to Solaris 8 (work related reasons),
so I migrated all my services to an Opteron Sunfire server running SCXR b49
with a zfs mirrored pool. However, root is on a non-mirrored ufs partition so I
still would like to start the full backups onto the USB drive again.
I want to avoid the ufs endian issue, so I figure that zfs is the right format
to use on the drive. It's not clear whether this is possible. I thought that
using a zfs import/export into it's own pool would work, but I wanted to run it
through here for comments first. Then if the system dies, I can restore files
quickly from any architecture server.
BTW, zfs rocks!
Just plug it into your VW :-)
-- richard
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