Having finally got my desktops and web server reasonably stable under FC11, I though it was probably time to backup my main server.
So I copied across mkCDrec from my Fc10 server to my FC11 desktop, and fired it off.
Wait a minute !, if was only going to backup the boot sector, not the main filesystem.
A quick look through the changelog showed the last major change was to include support for ext3. No problems I thought, I’ll just pull down the latest version. Darn, not known to yum. Thats ok off the the website for it… oops, I already do have the latest version.
Bother, there is no ext4 filesystem support, and that is the default filesystem for FC11 (excluding the /boot filesystem which remains ext3 so grub can use it).
Slightly peeved that I had failed to check this beforehand, I starting grepping through all the mkcdrec scripts for ext3 and where found started editing the files to inserted what I hoped were appropriate entries to get it to manage ext4 filesystems.
Then fired it up again.
Well it found the ext4 LVM filesystem this time and was going to back it up along with the /boot filesystem, so I let it start running; using the create iso files option.
It ran… the first iso file created was renamed out correctly, the intermediate ones were renamed out with correct sequence numbers but missing the datestamp field, and the last iso file created remained named CDRec.iso so wasn’t renamed at all, so my editing obviously wasn’t 100% correct there.
BUT they were all inthe correct iso directory with the tmp directory cleaned up so I think it was a complete backup.
The only way to find out, which will be next weekends activity, is to boot off them for a full system recovery (in a QEMU Virtual Machine of course) to make sure they are usable.
So alas I still cannot upgrade my main development server from FC10 to FC11 as thats my key machine and absolutely must be able to be backed up (also I can’t upgrade it until I get hercules working, the FC11 version of hercules from the yum repositories just doesn’t work (well it doesn’t recognise 3270 as a valid device which is a show stopper anyway) and my dev server is my hercules server.
And yes I’m sure there are other backup tools out there, but I have sucessfully used mkCDrec to do ‘bare metal’ recovery installs of my development server when replacing the disk drive (need bigger and better all the time) and it just works, so I want to keep using it if I can.
So next weekend I get to decide if I keep FC11 on my desktops by trying the mkCDrec bare metal install to the VM; instead of trying to get hercules working as origionally intended. After all, we must have bootable recovery backups mustn’t we.
UPDATE 2009/07/14 – doesn’t work. The boot CD boots the ramdisk and can’t find an initrd image; may be because I had to fiddle with the kernel options for FC10 and left the fiddle in (but updated with a new kernel). Will try again with the defaults for kernel and init images to see what happens.
