[Sunhelp] Solaris 7 pointers

[James Lockwood]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2000 sunhelp at orn.net wrote:

> I would like to be able to come up with a simple solution to mirror
> partitions from one machine to another(they will be homogenous hardware
> and OS/daemons).  Is there a good, secure solution to this without
> resorting to third party software and hardware solutions?

Do you want to do this at periodic intervals (nightly) or constantly
mirror?  Constant mirroring will be slow and will require either special
software or a good deal of coding. 

Mirroring at periodic intervals is easy to accomplish.  Run a short script
out of cron that iterates through the partitions you want to copy and
either does a dd or a ufsdump/ufsrestore.  If you wanted to use ufsdump as
your dump format and ssh as a network transport, you would do something
like:

ufsdump 0f - /dev/rdsk/whatever |ssh mirrorhost (cd /wherever; ufsrestore xf -)

By playing with dump levels you can minimize the amount of data sent over
the network as well as making sure that you don't have "dead time" where
the mirror partition is erased before the next restore.

-James