If you have a single Linux file server that you want to back up, and maybe a client or two, you can use the full featured Arkeia for free. This is particularly useful for home use, or if you are migrating to Linux in your shop and wish to just back up one server. Arkeia […]
Using Arkeia for Linux Backup
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part2
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 We are warned that filesystems on the disks to be converted need to be dismounted: The system will need to reboot: Confirm reboot: At this point, add a drive. After the system reboot, go back in to computer management/disk […]
Cloning Hard Drives with GNU/Linux
It is quite easy to clone identical hard drives using the dd command on GNU/Linux. Make sure that you put the source drive and destination drive in the system so that they don’t affect the boot. If you have a SCSI system, this is most likely done by making the SCSI IDs higher. With IDE, […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part3
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 At the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard dialog, check the disk you want to convert, and click next: Click finish to complete the Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard: There is now one healthy dynamic disk, and one unallocated disk, […]
Mirroring a Website Using rsync
If you would like to mirror a website, or any part of a filesystem over the Internet, you can use rsync over ssh. Here is an example: [opt]# rsync -e ssh -avz root@website.com:/opt/webroot /opt/ root@website.com’s password: receiving file list … done webroot/logs/web1.access webroot/logs/web2.access webroot/logs/web3.access webroot/logs/web4.access wrote 156644 bytes read 345589 bytes 3475.66 bytes/sec total size […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part4
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 An error may pop up that says “Logical Disk Manager could not update the boot file for any boot partitions on the target disk. Verify your arcpath listings in file boot.ini or through the bootcfg.exe utility.” Well, we are […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part5
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 Select the Disk to remove: Confirm: We now have a healthy Disk 0: Remove the missing drive: All is as it should be:
Using Dump to Migrate Hard Disks
One method to move filesystems around, particularly if you are moving your root filesystem, is to use dump. Dump is a lower level backup program than tar, but this also makes dump quicker, because it doesn’t have all of the overhead. Another advantage is that depth of directories, symlinks, etc. aren’t a big deal. In […]
Open Source Utility to Recover Lost Partitions and Fix Boot Problems
Famiarize yourself with TestDisk. It will run on many platforms, and supports many different kinds of partitions. We were able to compile the source on two different machines (GNU/Linux and Mac OS X Tiger). One problem with compiling on Mac OS X is that the ext2 libraries are not available. This was, of course, not […]
Bull-Headed Booting
One handy tool for booting linux systems and mounting the root partition is Loadlin. Now, Loadlin is *really* old, but there have been many times it has saved our sorry arses. You can get loadlin here. Loadlin needs some kind of *DOS on the floppy to boot from. MS-DOS 6.22 works fine; however, if you […]
Restoring Individual Files and Directories with Tar
One of our systems has a DLT drive we use for backup. It isn’t in a library, and we just use regular tar to back up our main share. Here are some pointers on restoring from tape with tar. First off, you need to specify the exact path from the perspective of the tar archive. […]
Nightly Mirroring via Rsync
In this article we showed how to use rsync to mirror a website. Well, rsync can also be used to provide a lukewarm recovery system. On this workstation, the root filesystem is on /dev/hda3, and we will mirror it to /dev/sda3, which we have mounted on /mnt. If you don’t have rsync, grab rsync from […]
Quick And Dirty Directory Replication Verification
The combination of find and wc is perfect for doing a quick verification of the integrity of the transfer. It doesn’t verify the content of the files; however, it is quick. Run this command in the root of the source and destination directories: find . | wc 9052 9052 256270 The first column of the […]
Creating an NT boot disk
NT gets a BSOD when you sneeze at the drivers/config. We have to do some upgrades on some NT boxes, but, first, we need to make sure we can recover from a system that can’t boot. This site started out with NT (cough… ntadmintools.com), but it has been a long time. Many Linux and Windows […]
Rsync Over a Flakey Connection
By default, rsync will start the sync of a particular file over again if the connection is lost. Use the –inplace option if the sync is getting hung up on a large file: rsync -e ‘ssh -p sshport’ -av –inplace /source/ root@example.com:/dest/ Since the problem file is compressed, it does no good to use -avz, […]
Using the Windows 2000 Recovery Console to Fix NT
In this article, we created a boot disk that could recover from a rename of ntldr. Well, what if you needed access to other files on the NTFS file system to recover. It would be nice if you could use something like the Windows 2000 Recovery Console to fix the filesystem. Well, guess what? You […]
Backing Up Windows XP With FreeNAS
We wrote about FreeNAS in this series of articles. A lot has happened with FreeNAS since then. The most important addition is user security for CIFS. We brought up an old PII 333 box to test performance, and it passed with flying colors doing a rather large backup over the network. Here is a screenshot […]
Checking the Root Filesystem without Rebooting
I’m not making any guarantees about this or even recommending it, but this is a procedure you can use to fsck a Linux root filesystem in a situation where a reboot is impossible but you suspect filesystem corruption. Example: Remote web server suspected of having filesystem corruption. Can be taken out of service for maintenance […]
Cloning Hard Drives with GNU/Linux
It is quite easy to clone identical hard drives using the dd command on GNU/Linux. Make sure that you put the source drive and destination drive in the system so that they don’t affect the boot. If you have a SCSI system, this is most likely done by making the SCSI IDs higher. With IDE, […]
