Bootable Restoration CDs with Mondo

You're probably saying, “Great, I have a bunch of CDs; now what?” Because the CD you made is bootable, you can pop it right in your CD-ROM drive and begin your mondoarchive restore learning experience. Four different restore options are available: barebones (nuke), interactive, expert and advanced.

If you're using mondoarchive solely as an emergency restore utility, the only option you really need to worry about is nuke. After the CD boots, type nuke at the prompt and watch mondoarchive do its magic. After it is done restoring, your system comes back to the way it was before you ran mondoarchive. This can be handy in the event of a catastrophic server failure when you need to get back up quickly. It also can be helpful when you're building preproduction or test bed systems that you would like to roll back to a certain development point.

The interactive mode of mondoarchive also can be useful. This mode enables you to edit your partition table before restoring your system, and it can come in handy when building clone machines with different hard disks. Using mondoarchive in interactive mode enables you to change the size of the partitions to which you want to restore data. This is possible using a partition table editor provided in mondoarchive. mondoarchive is even nice enough to resize your partitions when running in nuke mode, but here you don't have control over the sizes it uses. mondoarchive also resizes partitions in interactive mode, but you have the ability to change what it suggests.

To use mondoarchive in interactive mode, boot to the CD and type interactive. A menu appears asking you how you want to restore (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Mondo's Interactive Mode

Your options are Automatically, Interactively and Compare. The option we want to select here is Interactively. After making the selection, you are asked where your data should come from (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Selecting the Data Source in Interactive Mode

Select the appropriate location and continue. Next, a partition manager screen appears (Figure 4) from which you have the ability to edit partition information. You also can change the device name, mountpoint, filesystem format and partition size. After making your changes, click OK to continue.

Figure 4. Editing Partition Information in Interactive Mode

From this point on, Mondo asks you a series of questions regarding the restore operation:

- Are you sure you want to save your
  mountlist and continue?  YES
- Do you want to erase and partition
  your hard drives?  YES
- Do you want me to restore all your data?  YES
- Initialize the bootloader?  YES
- Did you change the mountlist?  YES
- You will now edit fstab and lilo.conf/grub.conf,
  to make sure they match your new mountlist.  OK

Mondo then opens up /etc/fstab and lilo.conf/grub.conf for editing in vi. You should make changes accordingly so they match your new mountlist:

- Edit them again?  NO
- Label your ext2 and ext3 partitions
  if necessary?  YES

When Mondo is finished, it throws you back to a prompt for reboot. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to reboot.

In addition to a total restore option, mondoarchive also provides another function. In the event that the data on the machine you cloned is static, you probably don't want that data to change. This is the case at Midwest Tool & Die with our Linux routers. Using mondoarchive, we have the ability to verify a software load against the backup and discover whether any changes have been made recently. This is easy. First, reboot the system with CD #1 in the CD-ROM drive. Then type # compare.

When mondoarchive is finished, it puts the compare results in /tmp/changed.txt. There will be differences between the CD and the live filesystem you checked. Log files and most everything in /var, for example, are going to change all the time, so don't worry about them. What you probably want to look for are changes to anything located in directories such as /boot or /etc. The configuration files in those directories are system-specific and should not change much after the system is up and running. If you find changes to those files and you don't remember making them, you most likely have a problem.

The only problem with doing the compare is the fact that you have to bring down the system to verify it. Although this may not be a problem in some environments, you may be in a situation where your servers must be up 24 hours a day. In those cases, you probably are better off doing the verification during a scheduled downtime. An alternative to using mondoarchive to verify systems is the popular application Tripwire. I would recommend using Tripwire for static systems that need to be up all the time.