Backup & Recovery: Ch.10 Solaris Bare Metal Recovery (Flash Archive)

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This entry will contain updated information for this chapter of Backup & Recovery. If W. Curtis Preston wants to update some information from the chapter, this is where it will go. If you'd like to add your own thoughts or suggestions, feel free to click edit and help out!

Solaris 10

When booting from a Solaris 10 CD, you must have a server that can handle NFS V4, as the CD forces you to use it. We ran into problems using a RedHat Enterprise 4 Linux installation as the NFS server.

First, on the RHEL4 server, we verified that NFS 4 was available, as shown by the output of rpcinfo:

[root@mirage ~]# rpcinfo -p|grep nfs
100003    2   udp   2049  nfs
100003    3   udp   2049  nfs
100003    4   udp   2049  nfs
100003    2   tcp   2049  nfs
100003    3   tcp   2049  nfs
100003    4   tcp   2049  nfs

Then we followed the instructions from http://www.brennan.id.au/19-Network_File_System.html, which boils down to this:

We created a directory on mirage (NFS4exports, like the example in the link) for the pseudo filesystem that NFS4 uses, then made this entry to /etc/fstab:

/vm                     	/NFS4exports/vm     none	 bind           			0 0

This basically creates a virtual NFSv4 export of /vm on /NFS4exports/vm (similar to a symbolic link). Then we ran:

# mount -a -t none

and verified that the mount was binded (bound?) by running:

# mount -l|grep bind

Then we added these lines to /etc/exports:

/NFS4exports             *(rw,sync,no_root_squash,fsid=0)
/NFS4exports/vm          *(rw,nohide,sync,no_root_squash)

and stopped and started the nfs services.

Then, to verify that this worked on our Solaris 10 server without booting into CDROM, I ran this:

mount -o vers=4 10.125.1.86:/vm /vm

which previous to configuring the linux server for NFS4, gave this error message:

WARNING: NFS server initial call to 10.125.1.86 failed: Not owner
nfs mount: mount: /vm: Not owner

Once we verified that we could mount the NFS share via NFSv4, we followed the Flash Archive procedure as documented in The Book.

Using FTP

It appears that the entire Flash Archive is downloaded via FTP before it is used for a restore, so you have to have enough room for it on the target CD.