We are having a Disaster Recovery exercise in April. My boss thinks it would be nifty if we could recover the 2.4 Linux system I just got installed (with much help from you SMOONOL's - Secret Masters Of Obscure kNowledge Of Linux).
The disaster recovery exercise will not allow us to have an organization employee with access to the HMC on which we will be operating, we would have to rely on someone at the vendor site to do any HMC interactions for us. We will be doing this in LPAR mode - We do not have VM, and with a 25% budget cut across IT, we won't be getting it any time soon. Secondly, the DR exercise will have us restoring OS/390 volumes to different device numbers than what exist here. We have procedures in place for that and it all works. I will have to do the same with the CDL backups of the Linux volumes since /proc/dasd/devices in any backup will reflect the old device mapping, I assume I will simply fall flat on my face if I try to IPL from the CDL copies. So what is necessary after a CDL restore is done to new DASD in order to IPL the Linux system? Is there an initrd that must be booted from the HMC so that adjustments to the image may be done? Is there some OTHER way to alter/access the CDL volume structure from OS/390 to make the changes necessary to IPL? If we have to have the vendor operator performing initrd boots and entering in the initial ramdisk information so that I could telnet into the system and fix things that way. Note, we will ONLY have 3270 dumb terminals at this site, from what I understand. Contract has not previously included network attached desktop PC's from which I can run a decent VT100 capable telnet session, or TN3270. That alone may kill this. So now that I've outlined this fairly hopeless situation.... is there anything that can be done to allow us to accomplish a disaster recovery test of Linux in the described environment?
