Quote:
Originally Posted by TerryP
Yes, if you install rsync & whatnot as necessary for the operation. The built in dump and restore programs should also be usable for that purpose.
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This is how we do our restores, now that all our servers are being backed-up to a central server via rsync. The restore process is now (taken from our internal wiki):
Code:
Complete System Restore - FreeBSD
* Boot replacement server off a FreeBSD LiveCD (Frenzy/FreeSBIE/etc)
* Enable modifying of drives while the system is running
sysctl -w kern.geom.debugflags=16
* Slice the drive into one large slice using the auto feature of fdisk/sade/sysinstall (whichever is available)
* Partition the slice as needed (see fstab in the source server's etc directory)
bsdlabel -e /dev/ad4s1
o You can specify partition sizes using "10g" format, put "unused" for the filesystem, and put "*" in for all the other fields to have it automatically fill in the blanks
* Format the partitions as needed
newfs -U /dev/ad4s1a
newfs -U /dev/ad4s1d
and so on
* Mount the partitions under /mnt
mount /dev/ad4s1a /mnt
mkdir /mnt/usr /mnt/var /mnt/home
mount /dev/ad4s1d /mnt/usr
mount /dev/ad4s1e /mnt/var
mount /dev/ad4s1f /mnt/home
* cd to /mnt (not needed, but a good safety-net, just in case)
* Run rsync to copy everything from Megadrive to the server
Note 1: --numerical-ids is *very* important, do not forget this option, or things will fail in spectacular ways!
Note 2: -H is needed to restore hardlinks to various files. Without this, the restore will be huge, and will fail. FreeBSD uses hardlinks a lot!
rsync -vaH --partial --stats --numeric-ids --rsh=ssh --rsync-path="sudo rsync" username@source:/ /mnt/
* Grab a coffee as it does the transfer. Takes about 20 minutes for a firewall image.
* Install the standard boot blocks into the boot sector of the drive
fdisk -B /dev/ad4
* Reboot the server to make sure everything comes up correctly.
I use Frenzy 1.1 for this. Works nicely, especially since it includes rsync.
Note: for the above to work, you need to have a user on the server that can run "sudo rsync", and that has SSH access to the source server.
Quote:
If the disks are the same size, I would probably use a live cd, dd, ssh, and gzip out of laziness; and skip the install disk all together.
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See above. It's an almost painless process, and goes a lot quicker than doing a minimal install of FreeBSD. We're down to about 30 minutes to restore a server from backups, depending on how much data is on the server.