On Sat, 6 Oct 2001, Mike Sowka wrote:
> #1) How is it that xfsdump is able to dump / while it's mounted? And how
> "industrial-strength" is that?
xfsdump only works on mounted filesystems. As you suggest, xfsdump might
miss files that are created during a dump, or report a warning if a file
is removed during a dump. When you ask about "industrial strength", this
depends on what your goals and expectations are.
xfsdump is not really designed as a snapshotting tool. If you want that,
then just umount your filesystem and do something like 'dd if=/dev/sda
of=/dev/tape'. xfsdump is designed tp be run regularly, giving the
guarantee that if a file was missed on one day because it was created
while the dump was being performed, then that file would be included in
the next day's dump.
If this isn't sufficient, then you should probably investigate some sort
of hardware raid mirroring configuration (which has its own drawbacks of
course).
(I'm sure I've written this several times before ... Is it FAQ worthy yet,
Seth?)
> #3) Here is my "plan" for the cluster:
> - after installing the "golden-node" I plan on dumping all of its
> partitions /boot and / and storing the dumps on our head node
> - in order to clone: using etherboot (if I can get it running) I run a
> system off of NFS on my head node and xfs restore the partitions onto
> the rest of the nodes (linux xfs doesn't support simultaneous
> xfsrestores yet does it?)
Not sure what you mean by "simultaneous xfsrestores". But if you mean
several client machines, all running their own xfsrestore off a single
dump-file on an NFS server, then it should work. What isn't supported is
a single xfsrestore, restoring from multiple dump-files or multiple tapes
simultaneously. This is simply a performance issue, xfsrestore is fully
functional otherwise.
Ivan
--
Ivan Rayner
ivanr@xxxxxxx
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