After executing flarcreate command successfully.
This is the output of flar info.
Now I need to know your assessment of the archive structure.
Shall I boot the other system from CD 1.
It looks like there is plenty of data not archived.
Yes, it does. Was the system running an application when you archived it? Is there a database (e.g. Oracle, or whatever) running on it that needs to be shut down first? Do you know whether there are files >4GB on there? If so, the standard cpio utility that flar uses will not handle those and you'll need to specify pax to be used instead. No big deal. It's '-L pax' as a command line option.
Flash is the way to deploy multiple clone systems with packages installed, et al, easily. If you had suitable identical hardware (or near identical hardware) you can breed hundreds of systems this way.
Whilst creating the flash the system should be as quiescent as possible, or even booted via CDROM into single user but obviously that means manually plumbing the network interface, mounting the remote NFS handle, etc, before flashing, but it isn't hard.
Yes. You just boot into the Solaris install routine (not single user) and at some point it will ask you where the install media is. On a fresh install you normally say it's the CD/DVD that you've booted from, but instead you can tell it that you want to install from flash. It will then ask where the flash is and you say NFS. You can then specify the full path to the flash and you'll probably need to specify the NFS server ip address (because it won't resolve a node name without more work) followed by the path (e.g. /sharename/Backup) or whatever. The install routine should then latch onto the flash and that will tell it the whole config, lock, stock and barrel. It will configure identical VTOC (that's partition table in Microsoft speak), swap space, everything. It has a lot of work to do so, if the flash is big (after you resolve why yours isn't), it might seem unresponsive for some time but don't be tempted to mess with it, just let it run.
I think that you should go ahead with the clone install on the bad machine just to get familiar with it. Then, if you need to create a new flash archive from the good machine at least you'll know exactly what you're doing.
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Another point is that a flash install assumes it is installing on 'bare metal' so it might ask for permission to overwrite the existing disk configuration. Alternatively, you could boot into single user first and use 'format' to blow away the VTOC. Either way, no problem.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a supervisory control and data acquisition application running on this machine, besides real-time control software which interacts with remote hardware through ethernet network.
As you can see in the photos above, in /usr/home/kunde directory, there are executable files each with a size of 8 GB. All of them run the same application shown in the last photo.
Maybe they had different versions of them.
I have already read about Solaris installation from a flash archive.
But I wanted to know whether there is a difference in the versions of Solaris on the CD I burned and the one that I flash archived?
I have also read about the fact that Solaris needs to be as inactive a state as possible before we start it. Why don't we re-do the flash archive in single user mode and make sure all the processes are not running (I still don't know how), in other words, how can we make sure nothing would be excluded except for the mount point directory?
When you install from flash the Solaris version installed comes from the flash (not the CD you booted from), otherwise a clone wouldn't be clone, would it?
So you should use the pax option which can cope with that file size. Create a new flash archive using that.
I will work on flar create with pax option as you suggested.
But can you clarify what you meant by blowing away VTOC?
All I meant was that you could boot into single user and use 'format' to edit out the slices (partitions) on the hard drive so that when the Solaris install routine looks at the hard drive it sees that there's nothing there already i.e. all unallocated space. But it doesn't matter, the flash install should work fine anyway.
I tried with -L pax
ERROR: Option -L is invalid
I searched the web but didn't find information
Hmmmm........that's new to me. I'll take time to look at this.
Here's a reference page from Oracle and Solaris 10 that clearly shows that '-L pax' option switch:
Here's a thought.......
I wonder if the good machine has origins in Solaris 8 or 9 when the pax option did not exist.
You put Solaris 10 on the bad machine and got it running. If you login to that box and do:
# man flarcreate
does it offer that switch option?
Just wondering if the flarcreate on the good machine is out-of-date.
I read it already before I sent the problem here.
To my understanding, flarcreate only backs up files that belong to packages.
There was no error message, so my conclusion is that the big files do not belong to a package and are not in scope.
I will check that.
So, if it turns out to be outdated...can we install any patches to make it up to date?
Actually, there was one error. But couldn't see the details of it.