Believe it or not, we have been struggling for almost four years to get our tape drive to work. We originally had an FC-20 with a 768 meg native 3020 Colorado tape drive. By the time the kernel and ftape had caught up to our model, we had replaced it with an Iomega Ditto Max […]
Ftape configuration
Scheduling backup of directories with tar and cron:
Tar is quite useful for copying directory trees, and is much more powerful than cp. To copy directory /home/myhome/myimportantfiles to /share/myhome/myimportantfiles: cd /home/myhome/myimportantfiles tar -cvf – . | tar -C /share/myhome/myimportantfiles/ -xv To schedule this to happen every day at 1am: crontab -e vi will run. If you are unfamiliar with vi, push ‘i’ to […]
Simple multi-tape backup with tar / Standby File/Print Server
We have a share available via NFS called share. All of our software, documents, versions of websites are on this share. It doesn’t contain any live systems stuff, but it is quite large. We bought a 15/30 gig DLT drive for cheap on Ebay, and some used DLT tapes to go with it. Many of […]
SYSLINUX
[Updated 8/27/02] SYSLINUX is a bootloader for Linux using MS-DOS floppies. It is good to learn how to create your own SYSLINUX recovery diskettes for disaster recovery. [On a related topic, check out SuperRescue CD. SuperRescue is an iso image you can burn to a CD. The CD is bootable and has a suite of […]
Quickie backup over the net with GNU tar
If you want to back up a bunch of files over a network (or locally), one approach is to go into the directory you want to back up, and execute: tar cvpf – . | tar xpv -C /share/backupetc092901 This will save permissions, as well as grab hidden files, dates, symbolic links, /dev stuff, etc. […]
Using Arkeia for Linux Backup
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Using Last Known Good Configuration To Restore an NT System
In this article we used the Windows 2000 recovery console to fix the filesystem on an NT server. Let’s use the recovery console to make a BSOD. We’ll just disable a required boot service: Let’s reboot: Nice!! That is what we wanted. Now, we could boot again and fix with the recovery console: That works […]
Creating an NT Emergency Repair Disk
Rdisk is used to recover your system from boot problems, registry problems, or OS corruption. Run rdisk by start->run->rdisk. You can specify /s if you wish to restore your security permissions. Rdisk is a little misleading. You might assume that simply pushing the Create Repair Disk button would work, but it doesn’t. Make sure you […]
Recovering an NT System With an Emergency Repair Disk
To use the Emergency Repair Disk we created in this article, you need to boot with the three NT setup disks that can be created by running winnt32: If you don’t have an NT box, you can use the NT distribution cd from MS-DOS or a Windows 95/98 command prompt and run winnt /ox. Boot […]
Using Tar to Upgrade Your Hard Drive
This is a story about a whale. No!! This is a story about making my computer happy. A few days ago, I started having weird problems on my main workstation, srv-1. My system would lock up completely. Only by pushing the reset button could I wake her from her slumber. I reseated all of the […]
The Archive Bit And Incremental Backups on Windows Filesystems
The archive bit is used to determine what files have been backed up up previously on a Windows filesystem. The bit is set if a file is modified. A backup program can then clear the bit when it does a full backup. This allows the backup program to do an incremental or differential backup that […]
Creating a Recovery Partition
If you have the ability to stick a second drive in your workstation or server, it can make a great recovery tool. True, there are a lot of CD recovery distributions out there, but the approach we use here will actually fit on a 100 Meg Zip disk. Further, it is portable to virtually any […]
Software RAID on Windows 2003 – Part1
There are 5 parts to this article: Part1 – Part2 – Part3 – Part4 – Part5 This series of articles will show how to set up software RAID on a Windows Server 2003 system. Before you do anything with your disks, make sure you have a good backup. Please read our terms of use. We […]
