On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Tzafrir Cohen wrote: > > > > The idea is sound. Note: > > > > Be sure you replicate the _entire_ system > > dd may be faster than tar | tar. Depends on how much data. > > Doing either of those things on a running system exposes you to a chance > of copying an inconsistant filesystem. I believe that the tar method is > a bit safer.
Neither is sound if source filesystems are mounted rw. However, he did say "boot from CD" from which I expect he knows that. > > BTW: you assume that the whole system is on one partition (/), right? I didn't. That is why Isaid, "Be sure you replicate the _entire_ system." > > > > > Some S/390 storage systems can have their own means of replicating > > volumes. That is likely to be faster. > > Even if the system allows you to copy a snapshot of a partition (I think > LVM is supposed to allow this, I'm not sure whether or not S/390 has > something equivalent) the filesystem may be in an inconsistant state > at the time of the snapshot. It will certainly be "not safely > unmounted". This applies for the dd method above. LVM allows consistent backups, but I was referring to ha hardware facility in the drive subsystem itself. I recall someone from Stotech describing theirs, and I think IBM's Noah's Ark can do it. > > > > > You might prefer to run rpm thus: > > rpm --root /mnt ... > > > > Probably doesn't matter in this case, but this approach doesn't require > > rpm to be installed on the target. > > Doesn't it? > > I recall reading somewhere that it uses the binary /bin/rpm of the > chrooted system for some stuff . I don't recall exactly where, maybe a > certain bug report. Maybe you should test this. It's how I've initialised an empty rpm database in an empty filesystem. I've also used it, years ago, to fix a RHL 3.0.3 system when RH upgraded RPM twice (or more) making it impossible to go from original to current without laying hands on all the intermediate version. On that occasion, I exposed the entire filesystem via NFS and used another system to fix it. -- Cheers John. Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb
