Backup of AIX server

Hi out there
I am new on this site but i need your help on 2 issues
I am a Solution Architect in the other world .. Windows
We operate in South Africa, and we have an old AIX that we still needs to run for a period of time.
I need to find a backup solution as we are moving the physical server, and do not have space for the storage that we currently backup to. I would prefer to have it backed up outside our premise. It must be a Full backup with a incremental after, there is not much going on so the incremental should be very small
On TOP of that, for some reason we need to restart the server every morning. Someone is doing that.
Is there not a way that we can get the server to clear its memory or restart every morning automatically so we do not need a person to do this manually

Thanks in advance
Thomas Bonde Ejby (Senior Solution Architect )

Hello,

Welcome to the forum ! We hope you enjoy your time here, and find this to be a friendly and helpful place.

Hmm, that's an interesting one, particularly about the daily re-starts. Can I ask what the reason is that the server needs to be re-started each morning ? Does it become entirely un-responsive and show signs of having crashed, or is it more the case that some application that is hosted on this server stops responding whilst the server itself is actually still up and accessible ? If you can give us a bit more information about the nature of the problem as far as the functionality of the server is concerned, we may be able to suggest a few ways forward.

In terms of backups, there are a variety of options here. At its simplest, the use of a utility such as tar or rsync, combined with ssh to transfer the resulting backup data off-site, would probably be a good way forward. But really the best approach most depends on two things: what you have available, and your own degree of comfort and experience in making use of whatever is available. Are you reasonably familiar with using AIX at the command line, or do you interface with the server in some other way normally ?

If you can give us a bit more information as outlined above, then we can take things from there. But welcome once again, and good luck !

Welcome on board!

I had ( a very ) long time ago some AIX servers that would restart without warning, meaning you can search in logs for the reason and find nothing, and one that was restarted every day, I was responsible of that because the server would crash within 28-35 hours, I knew what was causing it, but could not get the issue solved, so it was my play secure plan go for after midnight just after incremental backup, a shutdown/restart of RDBMS, full export, then shutdown/reboot of server... but all these AIX servers were old RS6000 or related and were running AIX 4.2.3 - 4.3.3....

So in order to give you the best suggestions by the team, it would be nice also to know what are we dealing with:
We know nothing about what server, model, architecture, if it has internal DAT drive and what type, the disks etc... and what is its purpose: RDBMS server, print server... and what OS version and at what level

Thanks

As far as mechanisms to reboot a server, there are all kinds of ways to do this, both through standard UNIX commands and tools, and alternatively through relatively simple scripts that could be created and run from a privileged account.

Cron is a standard utility that can perform a variety of tasks, individually or system-wide, capable of running a script from a user account or a system account, so you could create an entry to reboot the system every day just after backups complete.

This is a job for cron as @masinick mentioned.

You can write a nice script which will check for any login activity or active users before rebooting. It's a relatively simple script to write.

As for:

Hard disks are cheap and it's easy (and cheap) to clone an entire disk. That's how I typically move from one hardware to the other.

I do not know AIX well, but have my doubts.
The Solaris Sparc OS does not take standard disks for x86, unless you manage to put a Sparc disk label on them, and then your HW support is at risk. And if you buy supported disks from Sun/Oracle - they are not cheap. (These disks have a Sun/Oracle firmware that is automatically updated with OS patches.)

I do not have any doubt because I have cloned AIX system disks before.

You can Google if you have doubt

In the cybersecurity field we regularity clone disks from all computer systems with off-the-shelf drives. We often mount the drives externally so it’s generally not an issue.

In most security incidents cloning disks is one of the first step we take to preserve forensic evidence.

We never called IBM and asked their permission

image960×1053 110 KB

It’s easy to clone disks …. It’s not rocket science.

Also, this type of AIX disk cloning has been discussed in our forums a few times before:

However, the last time we did this, I recall we just did a disk-to-disk, bit-by-bit, copy / cloning utility, but this was for a cyber security task.

There is a lot of other info on the net about various other methods, including this:

Google searches provide myriad hits on various cloning techniques for AIX.

Hi
On the backup i think i did not explain correctly
Currently we are running a FULL backup, it seems we cannot make an incremental
Then we FTP that Backup to a Windows platform so it goes in with our Veeam Backup

I was just thinking, is there not an agent for one of the more common backup platform that can be installed and backup the whole server

Hello,

So if I'm understanding you correctly, the process works by taking a local backup on the AIX box, then transferring that backup image to a Windows server which is backed up by your central backup solution, thus resulting (in a round-about way) in your AIX box being backed up by your backup server.

Could I ask how you currently perform the local backup on the AIX box ? What product, command or script do you use to achieve this ? Knowing this might help us suggest another way forward here.

One thing I would point out is that there is in fact a Veeam agent for AIX. I've never used it myself, but it is apparently an option, and so could be worth considering. Now whether that's feasible or not will depend on a variety of other factors, most notably the version of AIX that you're running, and whether or not that version is compatible with the Veeam agent. But still, that could be worth looking into if you haven't already.