Re: [cobalt-users] Disaster Recovery question

[Malcolm McLeary <mmcleary@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Richard,

on 16/2/01 2:22 PM, Richard Young at ryoung@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Please let me know how your test goes.
> I would be VERY interested in how the RAQ4 reacts from a stand point of the
> GUI matching the sites etc.

I don't have a spare RaQ4 at the moment so I had a quick go with a Qube3.
Given owners have previously changed the identity of RaQs to Qubes and visa
versa I used a  RaQ4r OS Restore CD on my Qube3, then I did a full backup of
the Qube3 (as a RaQ4r).

Next I attempted to restore a backup of our development RaQ4i (from
yesterday) onto the Qube3.  After restoring each of the RaQ4i partitions to
the Qube3's partitions and rebooting, the Qube3 became the RaQ4i ... all
sites, all users, same IP address, etc.  :-)

It would appear that the restoration was successful.  Mind you the Qube3 was
first brought up to speed with the same updates as the RaQ was so very
little needed to be restored to /.

Returning the Qube3, which was turned into a RaQ4r and then restored to a
RaQ4i, back to a RaQ4r was not as successful.  The restore seemed to go
well, but Apache refused to start so something didn't happen quite right.

I have subsequently used a RaQ4r OS Restore CD on the Qube3 again and it
seemed to have some problems, although it worked fine the first time.  This
requires some more testing but the problems I experienced may have been due
to the RAID disks attempting to come back in sync.  This may also have had
an impact in my final restore attempt.

Personally I think it all comes down to getting the process right.  Part of
the process may be to disable the mirror disk until after the primary disk
has been restored.  There is also the issue of doing it live.  Perhaps it
would be better to turn off as many services as possible while a restore is
in progress.  This can be done, its just a matter of configuration.

I'll have another trial without the "RAID factor".

At the end of the day the best strategy would be to boot from an
alternative, and then restore the internal disk.  However I think this may
be a lot harder to get together than it sounds.  It would be nice if Cobalt
could supply a variation of the OS Restore CD which included the Retrospect
Linux client so the RaQ or Qube could be net booted and the then the disk
restored from a backup.

Cheers,  Malcolm