Mike Gerdts wrote: > On 1/16/07, Dave Miner <Dave.Miner at sun.com> wrote: >> Jacob Ritorto wrote: >> > HI, This is only tangentially related to the forum topic, but no >> > others seem to be discussing flar, so here goes: I want to use flar >> > to do both speedy DR and regular backup for some T2000 machines. I >> > made a flar of the machine in its initial deployment state and wanted >> > to just do diff flars from then on, which would be small and easy to >> > store many on a tape. When I tried to do the diff flar, it was >> > unable to read the original flar (using the -A argument to >> > flarcreate). Turns out I have to have the image unbundled in its own >> > directory for flarcreate to use it to compare. This effectively >> > kills my simple plan. Any chance of getting flarcreate to be able to >> > read .flar files instead of full directory heirarchies? Any simple >> > workaround that you know of? I have no spare machines or disks to >> > devote to the cloning and lu methods mentioned in the docs, and >> > that's a big waste of space and time anyway.. > > It seems as though a good approach would be to attach a bart manifest > as a section of the flash archive. This would make it so that it > would not need to read the entire flar to perform the comparison. >
Yeah, that would seem like an interesting optimization. >> You certainly have the option to log an RFE through service, but it's >> unlikely we'd work on it within the next year based on other priorities. > > Based upon the fact that the flash archive utilities are not slated > for being open sourced and new installation mechanisms are under > active development, does it even make sense to hold out hope for such > improvements? Will the Caiman installer even use flash archives? > (I've had a hard time figuring out just how much it will be > replacing.) > Fair questions. Even if we change Flash, it's not impossible that such an enhancement would occur, since the Caiman work is targeted for a minor release after Solaris 10, and we could still enhance Solaris 10 features independently. However, we haven't decided anything about what flash will look like in Caiman; to be honest, we haven't thought about that issue much yet. The issues around open-sourcing the current implementation would not prevent us from using and extending the existing archive formats, as they're specified independently and thus we can just construct a new implementation to the same formats. We need to discuss the requirements, though; the disaster recovery and backup uses that people have found interesting weren't the original design so there may be reasons to take a different approach. Overall, I think it's possible we can help meet this use case, but the time frame would be about what I originally stated. Dave
