automatic dump and restore over

Rickard Dahlstrand rd at tilde.se
Sun Jan 11 03:00:26 PST 2004


Hi,

I think I have a plan for upgrading a large number of computers over the network. I would really appreciate some help finding flaws in this idea.

All the servers is installed with one partition for /, one for /var/. When I do the initial install I move the /etc to /var/etc and synlink /etc to point at /var/etc. This should make the / partition exactly the same on all the servers.

On the reference server (where I do all the upgrades)  I then use dump to create a file from the / partition. This file is the zipped and moved to my laptop from installation on all the other servers.

The laptop is then connected to the same network as the server that needs upgrading. The laptop is running DHCP, TFTP and NFS services.

All servers are set to boot using PXE and once I reboot it the server boots an image from the laptop containing a picobsd dist with a modified startup script. 

This script automatically mounts the hard drive on the server and a directory on the laptop containing the dump-file from the reference server. Then it uses restore to write the dump-file over the / partition on the server.

After the upgrade is complete I reboot the server without the DHCP server active and the server should boot using the new / partition.

Can this work? I have read that dump/restore is the best solution for backing up disks. Could there be any problems using restore on a partition already allocated?

Thanks, Rickard.


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list