Thanks for responding.
My concern is - does the CD I'm booting off of have to be at the same
patch level on on the tape (for example an AIX 5.3.00 CD and a mksysb
at 5.3.05-01)
I've been trying for a while with very little success to build a NIM
environment. There's something going on with the networking on the NIM
master. The response to building a new machine from an existing SPOT is
spurrattic, meaning that the bootp on the NIM master will see the
requests but won't even respond half of the time. I've opened up a
trouble ticket with IBM but they don't seem to have a clue on how to
resolve it. I've gone as far as destroying the entire NIM environment
and rebuilding it, as well as the entire networking environment.
I suppose I can pull down the DVD's of the latest patch level if
necessary (it's probably smarter then what I'm currently doing
anyway.)


jthomp1515@yahoo.com wrote:
> michael.shulman wrote:
> > Is it possible to write a mksysb image that I've saved to an nfs share
> > to a bootable tape from the machine with the NFS share?
> > Basically I'm looking to have a disaster preparedness strategy, so in
> > the event of a system crash, I could write the weekly mksysb from the
> > NFS share to tape and recover the OS from that.
>
> 1. I have done it.
> 2. It's way more complicated than it's worth
> 3. It's not supported by IBM.
> 4. Check out NIM --it's in all AIX installs, it's easy to set up and
> it's supported. You can boot off the network and restore any mksysb
> you can save to the NIM server.
>
> Also - do you really need a BOOTABLE tape? You could always boot off
> CD's then install from the mksysb backup copied onto a tape... Half
> the time AIX has a bug in it requiring you to do this anyway although I
> think it's cleared up this year. ( It'll be back...)