Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

I will be setting up a NIM Server soon to act as a place to store mksysb images from my 6 AIX nodes.

There are two Intel/Red Hat nodes in the shop that I am consdering moving over to the Power5 platform.

Question:

Is there an equivalent procedure of creating a mksysb (root filesystem) image so that I could recover the system on the Linux nodes?

Seems as though once the image was there, things would be fairly easy.

Just what process should I use to create the rootfs image in Linux?
#AIX-Forum

Originally posted by: nagger

Hi, an interesting and complex question.
As far as I know you can't create a mksysb image of a Linux OS, so this is never going to work.

I am told the a company Storix has a product SBA that provides features very similar to mksysb for Linux but I have not tried it myself. I have no releationship with this company but Google found details at http://www.storix.com/product.html

You can do it the other way around i.e. run NIM from a Linux machine to recover AIX machines but that does not help you. This is called NIMoL (NIM on Linux).

There are other backup mechanisms for Linux but if you want something simple and cheap then most people go for a reinstall from the original media (this could be via a quick minimum network install) and then over write this OS with the backup from what ever media you prefer like: from a tar image on tape or NFS or a backup server. Don't forget to reboot once done to pick up any new Linux kernel images etc. You may need to have detail of network addresses, disk partitions and filesystem size etc, so keep them handy.

I am told you can backup on pSeries to a writeable DVD if your basic system is less than 4.7 GB but again I have not tried this myself.

If you decide this is not good enough and write an open source mksysb for Linux, you will be a hero.
#AIX-Forum

Originally posted by: nagger

Oh I should have added:

The main technical problem is that mksysb/NIM boot strap knows how to build an AIX rootvg volume group, recreate AIX style basic logical volumes and initialise the AIX filesystems - ready to recover the backup image into ready for a reboot to disk.

It does not know how to create a similar Linux disk setup and Linux supports 1000's of combinations: disks, partition types, S/W RAID, volume managers, filesystems, so it is much more complex.

The filesystem backup image is the easy bit.

This can be made much more simple in the Virtual IO Server case were the VIO Server can keep a workable say 4GB image of Linux partition that can be copied to the LPAR and rebooted in a couple of minutes. Ready to overwrite from the backup or you can use this meathod for backing up :-)
#AIX-Forum