Rob Owens wrote: > I had an idea and wanted to get some feedback from you guys. > > I'd like to make an easy method for restoring large off-site backups in > the event the host loses all of its data. The fastest way to do this is > probably to send the physical hard drive to the place where the host > resides, via overnight mail. (The idea being that a local restore of > 100GB of data will be much faster than an over-the-internet restore). > The issue then becomes getting the pooled data off of that hard drive > and back onto the host in question. > > My idea is to run my BackupPC server on a hard drive installation of > Knoppix. Every time you booted the BackupPC server, it would run > through the hardware autodetection like it does when you boot a Knoppix > live cd. The advantage is that I could install that hard drive (or a > mirror of it) into any machine and with zero configuration I'd have an > operational clone of my BackupPC server. This makes it very simple to > mail or hand-deliver the hard drive and restore locally. > > I've remastered Knoppix before, so I think I can handle this project. > But before I get started, does anybody know of an easier way of > achieving what I'm trying to achieve? And does anybody have any advice > regarding doing this with Knoppix? > > One specific question: does anybody know if it's possible to install > Knoppix like this using software RAID 1? > > -Rob > > Hey Rob,
I haven't had too much experience with live cd's and remastering but i can think of an alternative which only needs a couple of tools. These days standard linux hardware detection is pretty good. I think you can do this all in the following way...... 1. Install the OS of your choice on your main server. In my case centos. But thats irrelevant. 2. Plug in an external usb drive, mount it as an ext3 wherever you like, or go with hal which might auto mount it as /media/usbdisk (p.s. in my experience firewire cards dont always have enough drivers for linux, and i dont think speed is an issue) 3. Install backuppc from the source tarball and make the data directory the usb drive at the root of the drive. 4. Install mkcdrec from http://mkcdrec.sourceforge.net for full disaster recovery backups. It can write a bootable system disaster recovery backup to DVDRW. Then you simply shutdown backuppc and unmount the drive when you want to ship it. Send it with the DVDRW from mkcdrec. To restore on the new system..... The system only needs to have similar hardware. Whitebox clones are sufficient. Boot mkcdrec and restore the system. Reboot and watch it redo all the devices. You may need to manually tweak network ip addresses and display etc. Then plug in the usb drive. make sure it mounts on the same directory and start backuppc...Voila!!! Exactly as it was before. You could extend this with multiple USB drives and actually regularly rotate them rather than only in an emergency. That way you keep rolling sets of backups. If you use multiple usb drives then all you need to do is ensure hal mounts them on the same mount point and that the backuppc user can write to the root of the drive. I do this automatically with a customised init.d script which controls starting and stopping backuppc. And i also tweak hal so it doesn't automount, my init.d script takes care of it. I run the same type of setups in multiple locations and they work perfectly. I think that would do what you want, and perhaps a bit less frightening than dealing with raid and breaking mirrors etc. Hope that helps. regards, Les ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
