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Hi

We have a numbe of ageing SunOS boxes (Sparcstation IPX and ELC) which
are required for legacy support purposes.

The most likely failure mode of these boxes is the SCSI system hard
disks themselves, which inevitably will wear out and die at some time
in the future. The data and application programs are safely stored on
a server, and served via NFS, so we're OK on that front.

What is the best way to "image" these system drives, so that I can
quickly install get a system up and running again in the shortest
possible time.

I was thinking of just using "dd" to copy them to a raw image file, but
I'm not 100% sure how do do this correctly, or if there are any
pitfalls to be wary of.

Something like

dd /if=/dev/sd0c /of=blah.img

The "c" partition refers to the entire disk according to what the
"partition" part of the "format" utility is telling me.

But should I be referring to /dev/rsd0c, the "raw" device, instead of
/dev/sd0c or not ?

I was hoping there might bave just been a /dev/sd0 or /dev/rsd0 device
which just captured the whole disk drive but it appears not to be the
case (or am I missing something ?)

The other issue is what to do with any new disk drives I get.
Obviously not all of them will be the same as the SUN0424 drive that is
in there now, so if I use a larger drive, is it simpy OK to keep the
existing partition table and use dd to again write the disk from the
image (connecting the drive to another machine to do this) ?

Maybe I am best just to dump or tar the files back and forward, but
since this is a system boot disk, rather than just any old data disk,
I'm a bit more wary because obviously certain key parts of the SunOS
environment need to be in the right places for the boot ROM and SunOS
boot loader to do their jobs properly.

Any ideas appreciated, along with possible pros and cons of each
method.

I hope to eventually be able to use QEMU to emulate a Sun4 class box
and run all my applications on it in an emulated environment. At this
stage, QEMU + OpenBIOS doesn't fully support booting my old SunOS 4.1.4
environment (alas, shackled to the days before Solaris 2.5.x and later
versions came along due to the hundreds of legacy applications) , but
QEMU + OpenBIOS is getting closer all the time to realising that dream,
when I can finally turn the Sparcstation IPX and ELC boxes off forever.

Cheers

Jason

On 2006-08-18 04:30:56 +0100, "armistej" <JArmistead@mail.com> said:

> Hi
>
> We have a numbe of ageing SunOS boxes (Sparcstation IPX and ELC) which
> are required for legacy support purposes.
> [...]
>
> dd /if=/dev/sd0c /of=blah.img

This will not be great unless you know the exact partitioning of the
disk (in other words: have it written down) *and* you can obtain
replacement disks which are exactly the same size, for ever.

> Maybe I am best just to dump or tar the files back and forward, but
> since this is a system boot disk, rather than just any old data disk,
> I'm a bit more wary because obviously certain key parts of the SunOS
> environment need to be in the right places for the boot ROM and SunOS
> boot loader to do their jobs properly.

Yes, use dump on all the filesystems. There is mild fiddliness (which
I forget the details of - was it stuff in /usr/mdec?) to get the boot
blocks in the right place but this should be soluble.

More interesting, perhaps, is how you do a recovery from cold metal -
do you have install media etc? I'd practice one on a real box before
it becomes necessary to do so. You know this I'm sure.

--tim

armistej wrote:
>
> What is the best way to "image" these system drives, so that I can
> quickly install get a system up and running again in the shortest
> possible time.
>
> I was thinking of just using "dd" to copy them to a raw image file, but
> I'm not 100% sure how do do this correctly, or if there are any
> pitfalls to be wary of.
>
> Something like
>
> dd /if=/dev/sd0c /of=blah.img
>
> The "c" partition refers to the entire disk according to what the
> "partition" part of the "format" utility is telling me.

I've used an image just like this on a larger-than-original harddisk
with no problem. boot blocks and slices are retained, without editing
the disklabel/disk geometry you won't be able to use the remainder of
the quite possibly much larger disk - which shouldnt be a problem in
your case, though.

I had this on a sun4m, IIRC this shouldnt be any different on sun4c. You
could just try during scheduled downtime. I wouldn't actually switch the
machine off (powerless), because the most stress is excerted on drive
spinup. Most total disk failures we had occured upon powering up and not
during operation. So a cold stand-by box comes handy - they may be a
little harder to find by now if you not already have one.

step-by-step:
Prepare a narrow, single-ended SCSI drive with whatever disklabel (using
'format'). dd the image file to the sdXc device - the original disk
label gets overwritten, as dd starts to write on block 0;

dd if=/dev/sd0c of=/somewhere bs=1024k
dd if=/somwhere of=/dev/sd1c bs=1024k

Try to boot from it on a different box (after setting SCSI ID to 3, or
altering the fstab).

Another idea would be to setup a netboot server, but that is far more
work and may perform slowly.

Pascal.

In article <1155871856.791068.276800@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups .com>, armistej <JArmistead@mail.com> wrote:
>
> We have a numbe of ageing SunOS boxes (Sparcstation IPX and ELC) which
> are required for legacy support purposes.

QEMU is a great idea, but slight catch: it does sun4m rather than sun4c
emulation. (IPX and ELC is sun4c, IIRC.)

If this isn't a fatal show-stopper, then just might work.

Anyone here know where I might purchase or find SunOS 4.1.4 installation
media -- such as an ISO image, tarballs, something...?

I'd love to try this since I haven't touched 4.1.3 in about 15 years and
no longer have the 6250 bpi install tapes (which was for Sun 3, anyhow).

Also, Solaris 2.x has had support for SunOS v4 binary compatibility,
though I'm not sure if Sun has finally dropped it. Compatibility mode
was working and supported through at least Solaris 2.5.

That might offer you an interesting way to work around need for a SunOS
v4 environment, unless your needs are such where you really do need the
full SunOS v4 environment.

-Dan

HI,

Dan Foster wrote:
> In article <1155871856.791068.276800@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups .com>, armistej <JArmistead@mail.com> wrote:
>
>>We have a numbe of ageing SunOS boxes (Sparcstation IPX and ELC) which
>>are required for legacy support purposes.
>
<snip>

> Also, Solaris 2.x has had support for SunOS v4 binary compatibility,
> though I'm not sure if Sun has finally dropped it. Compatibility mode
> was working and supported through at least Solaris 2.5.
>
> That might offer you an interesting way to work around need for a SunOS
> v4 environment, unless your needs are such where you really do need the
> full SunOS v4 environment.
>
> -Dan
I am running SunOS 4 binaries now and then(XILINX FPGA tools), works
great and have been doing that since my first Ultra 1 running 2.5.1.

And I am on S10 now.

/michael