[K12OSN] Mondo Archive on K12LTSP 5.0 -Success

ssanders at coin.org ssanders at coin.org
Wed Sep 6 04:39:40 UTC 2006


Some more news... In a nutshell, it looks like Mondo works fine, and
Mindi has problems, probably just with paths.

Continuing testing Mondo, and I was surprised to see that recent
versions have the ability to run the restore, from a live filesystem!
Before, you pretty always had to boot from the boot floppies/mindi.iso
that Mindi created, and run restore from there. I created a tape backup
of /home on K12LTSP 4.4.2 (using LVM, but SELinux off), and ran
mondorestore from a running K12LTSP 5.0, (not using LVM, SELinux off) it
all worked well.

In trying a smaller test, of using Mindi to make a bootable CD, and just
backup a smaller dir, I ran into problems.

Mindi is the mini-kernel that Mondo uses, to minimal boot your system,
and give an environment to run Mondo under. As mentioned, you can run
the various Mondo variants now on a live system, which is nice (and
would suffice for by far most of my needs). However, the ability to have
a CD that you could boot to, to restore the whole system from scratch
would be nice as well. Unlike many backup progs, Mondo will let you
change your drive geometry, and move to/from RAID, and otherwise very
different drive setups upon restore.

In testing Mindi, you just run mindi from a root term window. It will
prompt you whether you want to use Mindi's failsafe kernel, and whether
you want to use Isolinux or Lilo. Every time I chose No on using my
kernel (which would use Mindi's kernel), it would end then with "install
Mindi kernel from mondoescue.org you need it". I had installed the
K12LTSP latest Mindi package.

Running it again, and choosing Y on "do you want to use your existing
kernel" and N on "do i want to use Lilo"
produced /root/images/mindi/mindi.iso which I burned to a CD, and now it
booted correctly, with all my hardware recognized and
mountlist/partitions all named like I had them. Since it appears to
handle LVM properly, this boot disk alone can be very useful. Most
regular Knoppix discs do not seem to easily see/use LVM partitions.

I will test some more tomorrow, and see if I can figure out what the
Mindi problem is. When you run Mondo, it's calling Mindi on it's own,
and you won't be able to easily tell it to use your kernel. Mondo is
also very usable with switches, so you can probably just tell it to use
yours. I'm away from that machine now, but man mondoarchive shows that a
-k /path/to/your/kernel will tell Mindi to use yours.

More later,
ss




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