using installation tape for disaster recovery

[Ian! D. Allen [CGL]]

>And finally, has anyone played with RIS?  We don't use it -- our of our
>machines
>have local root and swap and doubling up on software (doc's say you can't
>share with the server, right?).  What I'm wondering is, can I install just
>enough RIS stuff to allow me to boot a ram filesystem over the network.
>The way it is now, I have to move our scsi tk50 from machine to machine.
>I could spare the space to boot a ram filesystem, but I don't want to
>double the space for all the other subsets.

I support two DS5400, five VS3200, eight VS3100, and a dozen VS2000
using network boot and download via setld/RIS from one of two machines,
each of which contains the full complement of VAX and MIPS subsets.

If net boot is all you want, you can just keep the stuff under
/usr/lib/dnet that mop_mom looks at when doing a net boot.  Shouldn't
take more than a few Mb.  Once you've net booted, you have rsh, so you
can rsh in the things you're missing (such as newfs and /etc/disktab).

Once I've done a proper Ultrix install on one machine from subsets, I
"clone" machines by doing dump/restore over the network while running the
ramdisk.  Copy the remote machine's disks, change the host name in
/etc/rc.local, remove the old syserr files, refreeze the sendmail.cf
file, and presto a functioning workstation without the pain of the
full Ultrix install.  No tape drive needed.
-- 
-IAN! (Ian! D. Allen) idallen at watcgl.uwaterloo.ca idallen at watcgl.waterloo.edu
 [129.97.128.64]  Computer Graphics Lab/University of Waterloo/Ontario/Canada