This post is fetched from the freebsd-questions mailinglist, and is a perfect example on how I consider the Linux/BSD world to be superior to Windows, at least in terms of systems administration. On Unix, it’s all just files, devices and bitstreams…
From: n j
To: Martin McCormick <martin@dc.cis.[obfuscateddomain].edu>
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
When a System Dies; Getting back in operation again.
> … What is the best way to restore the full system?
> Can I use the FreeBSD installation disk in rescue mode?
I experienced such a situation just 2 weeks ago. My primary problem was that I had to do restore over the network (no attached tape drives, no external HDDs). I wanted to use ssh to grab the dump from the backup server, but ended up using netcat which worked great.
Here’s basically what I did including backup from the not-yet-dead machine (note, I used intermediate backup server, but it should be possible to directly pipe dump to restore):
- dump -0Laf – / | ssh backup-server “cat > dump.root”
- boot the new machine from CD disc1 (FreeBSD <7) or livefs disc (FreeBSD >7)
- create and newfs partitions as explained in this thread (at least the size of backup, can be larger)
- go into the rescue (fixit) mode, create mount points for created partitions (mkdir mnt.root), mount partitions (e.g. mount /dev/da0s1a /mnt.root), change directory to mount point (cd /mnt.root), configure NIC (ifconfig)
- start netcat (nc -l 55555 | restore -rvf -)
- on backup-server: cat dump.root | nc new-machine 55555
- repeat for usr and var partitions
Notes:
- if security is an issue, ssh out from the new machine to the backup server with port forwarding (ssh -R 55555:localhost:55555 backup-server) and pipe the backup to localhost (cat dump.root | nc localhost 55555); my initial idea was to start sshd in fixit mode (see my post to the list “fixit console with sshd”) which turned out to be too much of a trouble.
- restore uses TMPDIR to store some temporary files during restore process; the fixit mode has limited free space and when it gets exhausted the restore process will fail, so it is a good idea to use an available partition as a temporary TMPDIR (e.g. export TMPDIR=/mnt.var while restoring usr partition and later use a subdirectory of usr as TMPDIR to restore var partition)
- [IMPORTANT!] after the restore process is over, manually check restored etc/fstab and etc/rc.conf (currently mounted as /mnt.root/…) to fix:
- partition names (e.g. /dev/da0s1a might become /dev/amrd0s1a)
- ethernet interface names (e.g. em0 might become bge0)
- IP addresses in case you still have the old box running to avoid IP conflict
You should now be able to safely reboot and log into your new machine.
Regards,
—
Nino
Comments
One response to “freebsd-questions: When a System Dies; Getting back in operation again”
Strange – the last thing I twittered before seeing this post …
“Can’t understand why any IT person with respect for themselves would actually prefer to use Windows on the server side. It’s awful..”