Re: [gentoo-server] Imaging software for a production server

[Michael Irey]

I was looking for the same thing you are trying todo last week. I used 
partimage and was not happy with it, so I just used tar, and why not? Its 
tried and true, and I think its about 30 years old. 

I use this for our production mail (qmail) server.  I have tested by fdisking 
the whole drive and restoring.  I had no problems or errors using the 
restored server. These are the steps I took. Modify for your needs.

-- To Backup

1) save metadata about how the disk is partitioned.
  
   # sfdisk -l > /etc/partition.bak
   # cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak


2) back up master boot record (MBR)
   
   # dd if=/dev/sda of=/etc/mbr.bak bs=512 count=1


3) back up the operating system:
   
   # mount /boot  ## if its not already
   # cd /
   # tar zcvf - . --exclude='./proc' --exclude='./sys' 
--exclude='./lost+found' | ssh some_host "cat > backup_server.tar.gz"   


-- To Restore

1) boot live cd


2) partition drive(s)

   # ssh backupserver 'cat /etc/partition.bak' 
     Disk /dev/sda: 9729 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track
     Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting 
from 0
                                     
        Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
     /dev/sda1   *      0+      8       9-     72261   83  Linux
     /dev/sda2          9     133     125    1004062+  82  Linux swap / 
Solaris
     /dev/sda3        134    9728    9595   77071837+  83  Linux
     /dev/sda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty


   # sfdisk /dev/sda << EOF
   0,9,83,*
   9,125,82
   134,9595,83
   ,,0;
   EOF
     notes:
       sfdisk reads lines of the form <start> <size> <id> <bootable> 
<c,h,s> <c,h,s> 
       where each line fills one partition descriptor.


3) create file systems
   
   # mke2fs /dev/sda1
   # mke2fs -j /dev/sda3
   # mkswap /dev/sda2

   # mkdir /mnt/gentoo
   # mkdir /mnt/gentoo/boot
   
   # swapon /dev/sda2
   # mount -t ext3 /dev/sda3 /mnt/gentoo
   # mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/gentoo/boot

4) restore OS and data

   # cd /mnt/gentoo 
   # ssh target "cat filename.tar.bz2" | tar zpvxf -
       -j   Decompress with bzip2
       -p   Preserve permissions
       -v   Verbose
       -x   Extract
       -f   File

5) create proc and sys
 
  # mkdir /proc
  # mkdir /sys

6) restore MBR
   
   # dd if=/mnt/gentoo/etc/mbr.bak of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1
     notes:
       one could run grub-install --no-floppy /dev/sda instead.

7) reboot

--end

Michael Irey
System Administrator
................................................
SightWorks, Inc.
Portland, Oregon  
 
Web: http://www.sightworks.com
SightWorks : Creative Internet Technologies



On Friday 02 September 2005 02:16 am, Luca Dell'Oca wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have a couple of gentoo servers that I cannot shutdown for
> maintenance. In the past, I've used Acronis trueimage on my windows
> machines in order to create images of the drives, and I love the fact I
> do not need to shutdown the machine to create the image, and the image
> can be saved on the same partition I'm ghosting.
> I've tried several program for linux, but none of them seem to have the
> same features: partimage can backup live systems, but it cannot create
> the file on the same partition I'm ghosting and it creates different
> files for every partition, and all the other softwares have their own
> liveCD to boot from, but in this way I have to shutdown the server.
>
> Acronis has a linux version of trueimage, but it needs X to run, and I
> do not want to install it on a mail or web server, and gentoo is not
> supported, so I think it could be a PITA to install it.
>
> Any suggestion, maybe also some script able to copy also the mbr?
>
> Thanks,
> Luca, Italy
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