THANK YOU all for your thoughtful replies. So often when I ask questions, I end up with the dissonance of dueling paradigms...like a telepathic blind person talking with someone with a 'normal' sensorium. My experience on restoring machines has been with Microsoft, which doesn't rebuild very cleanly at all, and IBM's AIX which does it magically well, particularly with Sysback (which costs money, but is supported under the AIX service contract once you've purchased it). So the core of my worry is basically, 'Surely you can't just boot off the distribution media, get a barebones TTY window and then Amanda will restore everything with an under-the-covers tar -xvf rmt0 /'???? There are two problems, right away 1) I guess you have to reconstruct the partitions first (in Linux too?) 2) What do you do about boot records, hidden system files and sparsely-written data (you *don't* restore Oracle from a tar tape, fr'instance)....and these will be different with each OS and then there are possible other concerns.. 3) You have booted (off the installation media, I guess) and are running system code...what happens when you overwrite code you're running. I know that, if I'm running a script in a normal environment AND I update and save that script during its run, funny and weird things happen. Wouldn't that be the case with OS system code as well?
In all honesty, this is not so much an Amanda question (though anyone using A. must deal with it to do a system restore) as it is a OS-peculiarities question. Unfortunately, someone has absconded with my O'Reilly 'Unix Backup and Recovery Book', which should answer some of those questions. Does anyone suggestions for other books on the same topic (the problems #2 & #3) or have a good chapter on it for Solairs and LInux? I have the Running Linux book but it only talks about file restoration, not system restoration. There are all sorts of magical possibilities inherent in a Logical Volume Manager...which IBM has and gave to Linux...I am waiting/hoping for a Linux mksysb equivalent. FWIW, Sysback will work with mulitple tapes and supports tape streaming....if any AIXers would like more info on Sysback, feel free to drop me a line. Again thanks for thoughtful help! S. -- Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
