 Quick and Dirty Server/Workstation Replication Using ufsdump
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Ben Diamond and Keil Wurl
Five minutes of Internet searching can reveal a myriad of articles and scripts
on backup techniques and backup strategies. Sys Admin's archive
alone hosts a multitude of great ideas like W. Curtis Preston's hostdump.sh
script that appeared in Sys Admin's July 2000 issue. While many
of these articles and scripts focus on the backup itself, few devote any time
to restoring data or using a full backup image for system replication. This
article will focus on using ufsdump to perform a full backup (0 level
dump) of a Sun Solaris workstation or server and then perform a full restore
on an identical, unformatted machine.
Our team was asked to create and document a simple, inexpensive procedure
for creating an exact duplicate of one of our small internal Solaris servers
to act as a cold spare, in the case of catastrophic failure. The server currently
acts as an encrypting gateway and router. The data on the disk is fairly static.
We knew we would also be asked to use this procedure to clone a few Solaris
workstations. The key words "inexpensive" and "simple" limited
our search for the perfect utility with tons of bells and whistles, and curtailed
our foray into the creation of custom-burned Solaris jumpstart CD-ROMs. We decided
to keep it simple and use the base set of UNIX utilities.
Every UNIX distribution comes with a number of backup utilities built into
the OS. cp, tar, cpio, and dump are among the most
common.
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