Backup & restore to a spare server

My apologies if this is in the wrong forum, but it seems to be the closest fit.


I'd like to setup a spare server that can sit on a shelf and in case of a hardware malfunction can be pulled out, restore the previous night's (full system) backup to it and be back up and running quickly. What is the best way to go about doing this? The systems in question are running Solaris 9. The spare has identical hardware as the production system. Right now I am backing up to tape using tar, but I don't know how I'd go about restoring the entire system. I thought about ufsdump, but am unable to bring the server down to single user mode to do it. Any ideas besides clustering?

I would network the two system's/server's together (or atleast use a file-sharing type method so the file's/etc from one are transfered to the backup) and then once everything's on the backup leave it running as a server with the service's running. Can I ask why besides clustering? Might be a good idea.

take a look at the Linux-HA project..

they do something quite simmilar to what I think you are trying to acheive and more (ip-adress-takeover)..

Quote:

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taken from: http://linux-ha.org/

The basic goal of the High Availability Linux project is to:
Provide a high-availability (clustering) solution for Linux which promotes reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) through a community development effort.
The Linux-HA project is widely used, and is an important component in many interesting High-Availability solutions. We currently have a few thousand installations up in production in the real world. We are also work well with the LVS (Linux Virtual Server) project and expect to collaborate with them in the future, since our goals are complementary. Interest in this project is growing very rapidly.

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I could also whip you up a quick-and-dirty rsync using shell script to do most of the stuff you want ;)

I think that SUN (or BMC) has a software for Solaris hot standy that works thru the network (no clustering is necessary). At this time i cant remember the name (Guardian, sentinel?) --- there is a similar for HP-UX so those names can be for that....

If u cant find the above software try to google "bare metal restore" & solaris. It is that you want. restore a complete system without re-install it.