On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 12:29:17PM -0500, Kevin M. Myer wrote: > A number of commercial backup vendors ship bootable CDs with a copy of their > backup application installed. You can use these CDs to restore a system that > was totally toasted, due to massive disk failure, being hacked, etc. I'm > wondering if anyone has ever developed something similar for AMANDA.
One of my colleagues has built a bootable rescue CD based on the Knoppix Gnu/Linux distribution (see www.knoppix.net if you don't know Knoppix). His CD includes an amanda client besides our usual tools and goodies. I have just recently used this CD to clone two of our machines, testing the disaster recovery in case of a complate hard disk failure. Steps are: - booting from the rescue CD - setting up networking and starting sshd to be able to work comfortably from my workstation ;-) - partitioning the hard disk, setting up swap, creating file systems - mounting the root partition somewhere like /mnt/target - recovering the root partition using amrecover via the network - mounting the remaining partitions into the recovered root partition's mount points - recovering the remaining partitions - setting up tmp on the target partition (since /tmp is normally excluded from our backups), giving it the correct permissions - chrooting into /mnt/target and making the system bootable (quite easy with grub) - rebooting and testing the system. Works great if the new machine is identical to the old one. In my case, I ran into a (small) problem because the clone machines were only Pentium I while the original machine's kernel was built for Pentium II and higher. However, since Knoppix (and thus my colleagues's rescue CD) are based on Debian, "apt-get install"-ing an appropriate kernel wasn't very hard :-) The most tedious part of this procedure was changing the tapes (only a single DLT drive here). I should really take a look at the file: driver some time... Bye, Martin -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] toplink-plannet GmbH Network Operations Engineer Schönfeldstraße 8 Tel +49 [0] 721 6636-0 D-76131 Karlsruhe Fax +49 [0] 721 6636-199 http://www.toplink-plannet.de/
