Re: Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?
On 2 Mar 2011 22:07:39 -, John Levine jo...@iecc.com wrote: It's not as automated as the Windows approach, but if you know what you're doing it's mostly limited by the speed of the disks. Use dump rather than an image copy so you only restore what's actually in use. Unlike Windows, UNIX gives you the ability to create a fully programmable automated approach according to your needs, e. g. for multiple installations, defective systems can be booted via LAN, USB or CD, then it can be determined _which_ system it is automatically, and the proper backup sets can be restored. Partitioning tasks (labeling, slicing, partitioning, newfsing and tunefsing, as well as other pre-restore tasks) can also be fully automated, reducing any interaction to zero (which is less than nearly-zero), which means that it's even better automated than Windows. By the way, you can create similar procedures if you are using ZFS. -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?
It's not as automated as the Windows approach, but if you know what you're doing it's mostly limited by the speed of the disks. ... Unlike Windows, UNIX gives you the ability to create a fully programmable automated approach according to your needs, e. g. for multiple installations, defective systems can be booted via LAN, USB or CD, ... Of course. But the more interesting question is whether anyone's done that, e.g., a script to put dumps and a description of the disk setup on a backup device, and a boot image that will take the description and the dumps and put them back. As far as I know, nobody has. R's, John ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?
On Thu, 3 Mar 2011, John Levine wrote: It's not as automated as the Windows approach, but if you know what you're doing it's mostly limited by the speed of the disks. ... Unlike Windows, UNIX gives you the ability to create a fully programmable automated approach according to your needs, e. g. for multiple installations, defective systems can be booted via LAN, USB or CD, ... Of course. But the more interesting question is whether anyone's done that, e.g., a script to put dumps and a description of the disk setup on a backup device, and a boot image that will take the description and the dumps and put them back. As far as I know, nobody has. Sometimes called bare-metal restore. The tools are there, but I haven't seen it done with FreeBSD, either. Handling media changes might be a little tricky for, say, a multi-DVD restore. And of course it should have a suitably scary This will destroy the system you are running! warning. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?
Hi folks, I confess I'm more familiar with Windows and for years I have Ghosted PCs as a very fast way to get an entire PC back online in the event of a drive failure. I can easily get a PC back online within the hour using ghost (or some drive imaging software). Is there something similar in the FBSD arena?...some form of backing up a server so that if a drive fails, upon replacement of the drive(s), the OS can be very quickly recovered from a backup (of some sort), or from an image, etc.? What options are available??? Suggestions??? Thank you, Ed ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?
On Wed, 2 Mar 2011 13:50:19 -0800, Ed Flecko edfle...@gmail.com wrote: Is there something similar in the FBSD arena?...some form of backing up a server so that if a drive fails, upon replacement of the drive(s), the OS can be very quickly recovered from a backup (of some sort), or from an image, etc.? What options are available??? Suggestions??? Other than mirroring techniques, the standard UNIX tools for dumping and restoring systems partition-wise are the dump and restore programs. There's a section in the handbook about how to use them. Another method is to use dd to make 1:1 copies of disks, which usually works, but is not very fine. :-) I would go with dump/restore and have a custom-made installer script handy which is executed after booting the system (e. g. from CD, USB or LAN): It slices, partitions and newfses the disks, applies labels if needed, and restores from the .dump files as intended. This is fast enough as it is a very safe solution. -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?
On Wed, 2 Mar 2011, Ed Flecko wrote: Hi folks, I confess I'm more familiar with Windows and for years I have Ghosted PCs as a very fast way to get an entire PC back online in the event of a drive failure. I can easily get a PC back online within the hour using ghost (or some drive imaging software). Is there something similar in the FBSD arena?...some form of backing up a server so that if a drive fails, upon replacement of the drive(s), the OS can be very quickly recovered from a backup (of some sort), or from an image, etc.? What options are available??? Suggestions??? It depends on what filesystem you're using. For UFS, there are two basic ways. Copy at the block level or the filesystem level. The first would be dd(1), the second dump(8)/restore(8). There are third-party backup programs like (beta) versions of Clonezilla (http://www.clonezilla.org) that understand the filesystems and try to copy only used blocks but include MBRs and other information. For speed of an image restore, dd(8) using a zero-filled image might be fastest, and will restore the MBR or GPT and slices and everything. I have a little bit of information about dd and Clonezilla and a lot more about dump in http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/backup.html ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?
Ed Flecko edfle...@gmail.com writes: I confess I'm more familiar with Windows and for years I have Ghosted PCs as a very fast way to get an entire PC back online in the event of a drive failure. I can easily get a PC back online within the hour using ghost (or some drive imaging software). Is there something similar in the FBSD arena?...some form of backing up a server so that if a drive fails, upon replacement of the drive(s), the OS can be very quickly recovered from a backup (of some sort), or from an image, etc.? What options are available??? Suggestions??? Lots of options. - The standard backup technique is dump(8)/restore(8). It takes more than an hour for me to get back up from a dead disk, but I think it would be much faster if I didn't encrypt my backups. [Also, size and speed of disks and backup media will matter, of course.] - There are ghost style programs that understand BSD filesystems. I don't really see any advantage to these. - mirroring techniques. This would mean that when a disk dies, you already have a copy of it ready to step in. Some forms of RAID will do this for you, there's a GEOM class that will mirror any filesystem on it, or you could run a separate program (e.g., rsync to copy changed files over on a schedule). Other than, possibly, the ghost options, you'll find more information on all of these concepts and terms in the FreeBSD Handbook. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?
This topic was recently discussed on the FreeBSD Forums, so I'll link it here: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=21993 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?
Is there something similar in the FBSD arena?...some form of backing up a server so that if a drive fails, upon replacement of the drive(s), the OS can be very quickly recovered from a backup (of some sort), or from an image, etc.? I've found that if you make normal backups using dump to a USB disk and keep an install CD handy, it's pretty quick to boot the CD, partition and format the disk, and then restore. It's not as automated as the Windows approach, but if you know what you're doing it's mostly limited by the speed of the disks. Use dump rather than an image copy so you only restore what's actually in use. R's, John ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Fastest way to get an entire FBSD system back online?
On Mar 02, 2011, at 12:50 PM, Ed Flecko edfle...@gmail.com wrote: Hi folks, I confess I'm more familiar with Windows and for years I have Ghosted PCs as a very fast way to get an entire PC back online in the event of a drive failure. I can easily get a PC back online within the hour using ghost (or some drive imaging software). Is there something similar in the FBSD arena?...some form of backing up a server so that if a drive fails, upon replacement of the drive(s), the OS can be very quickly recovered from a backup (of some sort), or from an image, etc.? What options are available??? Suggestions??? Dump and Restore. See the handbook: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/backup-basics.html___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
