Server Crash

Xian ian at codepad.net
Wed Sep 28 10:17:04 PDT 2005


On Wednesday 28 September 2005 14:20, Cody Holland wrote:
> Ok, I'm having some problems....due to the fact that I'm pretty new and
> have no idea on how to do this.  We had a server crash, hardware
> related, and I want to take my dump backups and restore them on another
> system.  The dump files are located on a remote ftp server.  So
> basically what I'm trying to accomplish is installing FreeBSD on the new
> system, getting the dump files off of the backup server, and then
> restoring them on a live server.  Is this possible, or should I be
> trying to do this a different way.  I cannot restore everything exactly
> without some changes.  The new server is SCSI, and the old server was on
> an IDE hard drive and I had re-compiled the kernel with all SCSI devices
> disabled (I don't know if that even matters).  Anyway I'm kind of lost
> and am looking for some guidance.  I've done plenty of reading and have
> attempted the restoration on my own, but keep hosing the new system.
> Any help would greatly be appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Cody

If you old system has the SCSI devices compiled out of the kernel this could 
make things difficult.

The way I would go about this would be to find a bootable CD of FreeBSD 
(FreeSBIE is good). And make the partitions on your new disks with it. Then 
make a folder somewhere (like /mnt/new) and mount your new (empty) root file 
system on it. restore your root file system from your backups.

Commands such as `fetch ftp://blah/blah | restore -rf -` could work nicely but 
restore can hang around long enough creating directories that fetch sometimes 
times out. just use a bit of cunning here or shout again on this list.

Then mount the other new (empty) file systems on /mnt/new or wherever _and_ a 
devfs on /mnt/new/dev. Restore the rest of the file systems.

Chroot yourself into /mnt/new and its just like your old machine was. Build 
and install yourself a new kernel with all the bits you need for your new 
hardware. Then reboot and remove the bootable CD.

I _should_ "just work" (TM)

Maybe other people here can improve on this but this way has worked for me in 
the past.

/Xian


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