[Sunhelp] boot tape ( re :)

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2000 Robert.Cross at scottish-newcastle.co.uk wrote:

> I know it is *possible* to boot from tape, but I haven't met anyone who 
> actually does
> it with Solaris 2.x, 7, 8, ....

The NFS bootblock worked as a tape bootblock last time I checked.  The
Solaris installation program isn't set up to restore files off of tape,
but there's no reason why you couldn't write a small program to do an
autorestore ala AIX.

> Maybe we can get something better than ufsdump/ufsrestore in Solaris 9, (or is
> it in Sol-8?)
> </complain>

ufsdump and ufsrestore serve exactly the purpose that they are intended
for, the dumping and restoration of file systems.

One really nice thing about Suns is how easy it is to set up net booting.
I make my backup server a netboot server as well and give it enough
scratch space to restore all of the files on a client system drive.  A
short script is run on netboot instead of the suninstall program, this
script partitions the internal drive, restores all system partitions,
writes the bootblock, then reboots.

System restore is as simple as selecting the filesets to restore off of
tape, which also enables the netboot for the specified machine.  Do a boot
net on the client machine and everything is done in 20 minutes.

There is no reason whatsoever not to automate this.

-James