System recovery with NetWorker
 

Hi.


I need to find an convenient way of doing a system recovery in case of a full system crash.

We have NetWorker agents running on all our servers ensuring that we have up-to-date backups of our systems. Moreover, our servers are clustered with failover enabled.

In case of full system crash (or maybe if there has been a security breach) I may have the need for replacing a server being in the exact same state as the last backup. I believe that a good solution to this is to make a bootable linux CD with NetWorker agent installed. When needing to to perform a system recovery I simply boot up with the CD, tell NetWorker agent on which server and path to find the correct system backup, and run NetWorker. When NetWorker agent is done, the system (harddrive) will be completely back to the desired state and I should be able to restart the computer having everything back to normal.

I don't know if this solution will work, so I would greatly appreciate feedback on this.

Most high end commercial backup products have disaster recovery CDs already.

For networker, check the following and see what they say: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/875-3148-10 .

On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with your approach other than the time it will take you to set it up (compared to the time to grab one they already have set up). This is actually the same approach I decided on for Amanda backup recovery, except I'm running Solaris on SPARC.

One issue you'll have to deal with is getting the network up. That puts me a little over my head on Linux boot CDs; but, with Solaris, the standard boot media leaves you having to plumb the network yourself, or it can take a small partition and install a mini-boot and then reboot with dhcp. What I decided to do was set up a standard IP address on my subnet named disaster, then build the CD with that IP. That way, on my subnet, I would just boot off the CD and run amrecover.

Thanks for the reply - it's nice to have it confirmed that my plan wasn't way off. :)

I will try and get the recovery CD from the vendor, if such a CD exists (it should). Otherwise I'll make one myself based on Knoppix or something.

About the networking issue: My aim is to have a generic boot CD that I can use for recovery of servers, regardless of subnets. So I guess I'll have to manually configure networking whenever I run the disaster recovery.

The vendor don't have such a recovery CD, so I have to make it myself. :/

And they charge you how much for their software? I thought all the high end vendors crossed their t's and dotted their i's, and that was why people paid money for their products. All the more reason to shrug and consider open source alternatives.

Solution
 

I was surprised that the vendor didn't provide us with a disaster rescue CD, but now I've created my own. Are testing it now - hopefully it works.