[ILUG] Disaster Recovery

[John P. Looney]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 06:09:14PM +0100, Darren Burnett mentioned:
> Looking to implement DR for our Linux boxes.  All are RHAS 2.1 + 3.  We will 
> need to be able to do a DR to different hardware.  Has anybody done this and 
> are there any recommended steps.  Also we are using TSM for our backups so if 
> anybody has steps for this product it would be appreciated, but any advice or 
> tips on how to DR to different hardware is fine.

 Linux is very hardware-agnostic, compared to Windows. 99% of the time,
all you have to do is rsync one machine to another, change
/etc/modules.conf and /etc/fstab as needed, then run lilo or grub to build
up a boot block. As long as you've done a trial rebuild or two, you should
be OK.

 So, you now need decent backups. I've been playing with some software
called "Bacula" recently. It's quite good, but needs a fair bit of
per-client configuration. One of the nice things it seems to do is
"disaster recovery". It'll build you a boot floppy that'll connect back to
the Bacula server & restore all the files & build the bootblock/partition
etc. for you. 

 That sounds like what you need. Needless to say, don't believe it till
you've tested it a few times.

John