Bootable Restoration CDs with Mondo

Many different types of systems can be backed up in various ways with mondoarchive. Here we describe only the situations we laid out earlier—to back up our servers and create clone systems.

In our environment, many servers perform various tasks, and each of them is configured differently. Some have multiple IDE or SCSI hard disks for massive storage, and some have only one IDE or SCSI drive. There even are some RAID systems. On some servers the data is ever-changing, and on some servers it hardly ever changes. It is possible to use mondoarchive to clone all of these systems.

First of all, it may be a good idea to look at your disk usage on a per-server basis. Pay close attention to what is being mounted, where and when. There is no need to back up noncritical information if it can be avoided; if you have large directories that do not contain critical data, you should think about excluding them. For example, we share data between servers over NFS and automount, and we have many of the same shares mounted on each server. What you don't want to do is ignore these mounted shares and have mondoarchive back up that data too. After you have identified the unnecessary mounted partitions or shares, you have the ability to exclude them with the -E option. The format of that option should be as follows: -E /a /b /c where /a /b and /c are directories. This will ensure exclusion of that data.

Now that you know exactly what you want to back up, let's examine the mondoarchive command and a few of its options. You have the ability to back up to CD, ISO images and an NFS share. In this article we discuss only how to back up to ISO images for burning to CD at a later time. For complete details on mondoarchive and its usage, read its man page.

Before you run the mondoarchive command, choose a place on your drive that has a lot of room to store a large ISO image file. Say we pick /home/mondo, and home is a 6GB partition. The command to use looks like this:

# mondoarchive -Oi -d /home/mondo -E "/home/mondo"

The -Oi option tells mondoarchive to back up the filesystem to an ISO image. Next, -d /home/mondo lets mondoarchive know the resulting ISO images should be put in the /home/mondo directory. Depending on the size of your system, you may have multiple ISO images created. Finally, -E /home/mondo excludes unnecessary directories. Here, we told it to exclude /home/mondo, which could contain other massive ISO images and cause your backup to grow unnecessarily.

In cases where disk space is low, you need to specify a scratch directory. This is a temporary directory that mondoarchive uses to build its ISO images before they are archived. In this situation, it is wise to tell mondoarchive to put its scratch directory in a large partition. Otherwise, mondoarchive most likely will fail when it runs out of room. In the example below, pretend /var/local/data is a large partition on your disk. To specify the scratch directory, run the mondoarchive command adding an -S option:

# mondoarchive -Oi -d /home/mondo \
-S /var/local/data -E "/home/mondo"

After running the command, mondoarchive checks your system, makes sure everything is okay and begins its backup process. It continuously shows its progress during the process (Figure 1) and may take a while to complete. When it finally is finished, it asks if you want to create boot disks. You can answer no, because the CD you burn will be bootable. If you want or need the disks, say yes.

Figure 1. Mondoarchive Running

When it's complete, you'll have ISO images in /home/mondo or wherever you specified, from which you can burn CDs. You can burn them in many different ways, including using Xcdroast, Webmin or the cdrecord command. To do this quickly, run cdrecord -scanbus. This discovers your CD writer's bus, target and logical unit number (LUN), which is usually 0,0,0:

# cdrecord dev=0,0,0 speed=xx /home/mondo/1.iso

When cdrecord is done, you have a restore disk for your server if it goes down.

mondoarchive also can be run automatically at a time of your choosing by setting it up as a cron job. To set this up, first create a script similar to the following and place it in /etc/cron.daily/:

#!/bin/sh
mkdir -p /home/mondo/`date +%A` && \
mondoarchive -Oi -d /home/mondo/`date +%A` \
-E /home/mondo

When placed in /etc/cron.daily/, this script runs every day at the same time. Upon execution, it creates a folder in /home/mondo corresponding to the day. If you run the cron job seven days a week, there will be seven folders in /home/mondo, each named for a day of the week and containing the ISO images for that day's backup. Of course, if you want to have these on CD, you can use the cdrecord command again.