Restoring /usr over network

[Joe Smith]

In article <9944 at brazos.Rice.edu> palkovic at linac.fnal.gov writes:
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 9, Issue 260, message 9
>Is it possible to restore /usr on a Sun from a _remote_ tape drive?

Yes, I've done it.  The key is to boot your workstation as a dataless
client off of a file server.  By dataless, I mean that root and swap are
NFS mounted from the server, /etc/fstab says to mount /usr via NFS, and
you are running a kernel that knows how to talk to local disks in addition
to NFS disks.

You can use the options "-asw" on the "generic" kernel to do this.  Tell
it to use NFS for root and swap.  Then you can mount the local disk on
/mnt and restore the /usr tapes from the remote drive onto /mnt.  (You
don't want to restore directly to /usr anyway.  Overwriting the file
/usr/etc/restore while running /usr/etc/restore is deadly.)

After it has all been restored, then you can reboot and use the real /usr.

Joe Smith (408)922-6220 | SMTP: jms at tardis.tymnet.com or jms at gemini.tymnet.com
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