Beechglen Development Inc.

Beechglen Development Inc.
3862 Race Road - Cincinnati, Ohio 45211 - (513) 922-0509 - Fax (513) 347-2834

Patch Planning

In order to make your new DLT 8000 function on your system, you've been told that you need to install some patches on your currently working system. What are the things I should do before installing the patches?

First, you should consider creating a System Recovery Tape (make_tape_recovery) of the working operating system (vg00). This will provide you with a fall back plan in the event the newly installed patches either fail to install correctly, or have introduced a new problem to your working environment. The items necessary are as follows:

Working tape drive (internal or external) preferably set to SCSI Address 0
Tape (DDS-2 Minimum)
An installed copy of HP's IGNITE-UX with the proper PAX patch.
Idle System

The make_tape_recovery tool creates a system recovery archive and stores the archive on a local tape. make_tape_recovery is capable of creating system recovery tapes for all DDS and DLT tape devices, with the ability to span multiple tapes. The archive created by make_tape_recovery is specific to the system it was created for and its identity includes hostname, ip_address, networking information, etc. In the event of a root disk failure, the recovery archive can be installed via tape to restore the system.

The contents of the system recovery archive will always include all files and directories which are considered essential to bringing up a functional system. This "essential" list is pre-defined by make_tape_recovery. By running make_tape_recovery in interactive mode, the directories and files which make up the "essential list" can be displayed. In addition to the essential list, data can be included in the archive on a disk/volume group, file, or directory basis. Non-essential files and directories can also be excluded.

At the command prompt, type the following:

make_tape_recovery -x inc_entire=vg00

If your tape drive SCSI address is set to something other than 0, then you must define the tape drive:

make_tape_recovery -a /dev/rmt/3mn -x inc_entire=vg00

(Where 3mn is the SCSI address of the tape drive).

You can verify the address of your tape drive by typing the following at the command prompt:

ioscan -fnC tape

The time to create the make_tape_recovery tape varies on how much data is in the root volume group vg00. You can figure between 1 to 2 hours to complete, but once it's started you need not be present. This is something you can start at the end of the day.

A good rule of thumb, is anytime you make any changes to the Operating System, create a make_recovery_tape before the changes, and create another make_recovery_tape after the changes are complete.