Originally posted by: apple08

dear all,
do u establish a kind of quideline to perform the mksyb in ur environment? one a month or something. may be u can share best practice. thank u

Originally posted by: MarkTaylor

Depends on the system really and how often the AIX config gets updated .. (new users / user config changes / system changes / patches etc )

1. Once a week is good practice unless you are 100% happy to go less frequent.
2. Always Always Always before doing any type of system work ( upgrades / patches / system config changes etc).

HTH
Mark Taylor

Originally posted by: apple08

thank you sir.
but now we are doing that frequent. in our environment, we have 1 server with 5 lpars with 3 same network zone with HMC and 2 having different network zone with the HMC. and they are sharing the same tape drive. we need to dynamic move the tape drive from one to another and do system backup. our problem now, once asigned to different network zone, we are uanble to move to different network zone from HMC ip. end up we need to remove the tape drive device, add to the another lpar profile as desired resource and shutdown the lpar.
i'm taking over aix last 1 month, wondering why its complicated with the shared resource. do we need another ip for hmc to allow the dynamic move or we need to open certain ports for dynamic lpar or we need to buy dedicated tape drive or using NIM?

Originally posted by: unixgrl

Couple of options:
1) Create your mksysb locally, then copy it over to the system that has the tape drive and write it out to tape

2) NFS mount some directory from another host that has enough disk space to store the mksysb. Write the mksysb directly to that mountpoint. Then you can leave the mksysb there or write it out to tape.

We don't use direct attached tapes anymore. As you can see, it is difficult to manage. If you don't have a tape backup infrastructure,
you should probably get enough disk on one system and send all the mksysb images there. Then, make sure that one system gets backed up.

We put our mksysb on a filesystem local to each host and then it gets backed up through the same infrastructure that backs up application data. (tape SAN)