How to setup net boot
I am working with third-party (Tadpole) SPARC laptops. They are true UltraSPARC II-e machines running Solaris 9. The physical machines offer an internal 40GB drive (the boot volume) and a hot-swappable bay which can be populated with either a CDROM drive or a second 40GB hard drive. There are three USB ports and two PCMCIA slots available for external devices, but neither of these options can be used to boot the machine (verified with Tadpole).
I want to replicate the internal boot drive to the drive in the bay for disaster recovery. I would perform either dd or ufsdump, but either task requires that both the source and object are not mounted during the operation. My only option appears to be to try and boot the machine over the network and perform the duplication from there.
First, is this process likely to actually work for what I want to do?
Second, can someone coach me in setting this up? I have two SPARCbook 5000 laptops (configured as servers), a Mac OS X 10.4.5 laptop and a WinXP laptop on my little closed network to get this done. Any help would be tremendously appreciated.
[1200 byte] By [
markalib] at [2007-11-25 22:36:05]
# 1
Wow - lucky you with Tadpoles !!
Mark,
The approach with dd, ufsdump, or tar, rsync etc. is a bit cumbersome as its difficult to keep up with changes in /dev etc etc. .... but it is possible to make a simple disk you can slip in and out (and boot from reliably in the event the inboard disk crashes).
One approach would be to use SVM / disksuite to mirror it up on the build and then simply write a script to detach and attach the removable drive. This would allow you to occasionally slip in the removable, attach the slices, sync up, and detach. When you want to boot from the outboard disk just do so at the obp...
I don't have time to elaborate but look into:
1. using filesys to mirror in sysidcfg on the jumpstart install
2. a script to detach the secondary mirrors
3. a script to reattach the secondary mirrors
Hope this helps (and works out for you) ...
--Brett
# 2
Thanks for your response.
I have managed to ufsdump and ufsrestore from the internal disk to the secondary, hot-swap drive without an alternative bootable device. I just booted in single user mode off the internal drive. I didn't think it was possible to ufsdump from this drive as long as I was booted from it, even in single user mode. I was wrong.
I was able to set the device alias in the OBP to boot from the drive bay device. Works great.
Now I just need a software to compare directories across networks to keep two boxes in sync. Any suggestions? I thought there might be a GNU utility, but I can't seem to find it.
# 3
Use rsync to synchronize directories across networks.
I used to work at a place that rather than mirror system disks would clone them (to a disk of identical geometry) and set aside the mirror as a warm spare. This was on Solaris 8 SPARC. The process went something like this and was automated in a script:
- Copy all paritions with dd. I suppose they figured that the data in open files was fungible.
- Run fsck -y on the filesystems so they are all clean.
- Reinstall boot blocks with installboot
- Test, test, test, test, test
