Re: Best way to duplicate a live Centos 5 server?

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The best and traditional way that has been there for decades is an rsync
and then reinstallation of boot-loader.
It works always if you know how it's done.

If you need detailed instructions, I can send you that!




On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Cal Sawyer <cal-s@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > You're right - documentation is pretty dire.  Guess i'm not alone in
> > hating doing it.
>
> Yes, I really, really wish the stuff they are doing was documented,
> somewhere, anywhere.  Not just how to use the program itself which is
> supposed to 'just work' unattended once you set it up, but the black
> magic of how they detect and reproduce all of the hardware, lvm, raid,
> filesystem, etc. across different distributions and versions.
>
> > USB backup is broken due to the order in which path variables get set -
> > sure is lot of fun trawling through the scripts to find out what gets
> > set when.  Hope the ReaR maintainers are interested in this and haven't
> > gotten themselves mired in tape
> > archive integration - i would have thought USB backup was the winner in
> > terms of getting broad acceptance as a bare-metal DR solution.
>
> USB is sort of 'hands-on' for something that should be unattended, and
> adds a lot of unpredictable messiness in drive detection, boot order,
> etc.    All you really have to do is export some NFS space and point
> ReaR to it.  At least that is the easy way to get started.  If you
> have another Linux box, just plug your USB drive in there and access
> it over NFS...  problem solved.
>
> Clonezilla-live plays in this space too, but it doesn't do raid or
> multiple disks at once, and you have to shut down to take the image.
>
> My 'ideal' system would be to  have ReaR generate a directory of what
> will be on the boot iso leaving that somewhere on the host without
> actually making the image.   Then use backuppc to back up the whole
> host and its normal duplicate-pooling mechanism will keep the extra
> copies of the tools from taking extra space.  Then when/if you need a
> bare-metal restore, you would first grab the directory of the iso
> contents, burn a boot CD, let that reconstruct the filesystem, then
> tell backuppc to restore to it.  That way would be completely
> automatic and always be up to date, with the advantage of backuppc's
> efficient storage and easy online access to individual files and
> directories.   If you don't mind wasting a small amount of space for
> the isos, I think that approach would already work if you tell ReaR to
> just make the boot image and to wait for an external program to do the
> restore after the filesystem has been rebuilt.
>
> > However, when it works - wow.  Just restored an HP dl360 w/HWRAID to a
> > Presario desktop machine and it lives!  No network, but that's small
> > beans compared to the larger win.
>
> Yes, I've even modified the filesystem layout file to go from a
> software RAID to a non-RAID, and to change partition sizes during the
> restores.   If it was documented, that capability by itself would be
> fantastic.
>
> --
>     Les Mikesell
>      lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
> _______________________________________________
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> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>
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