[ale] almost OT: Unix Recovery Legend

[Lightner, Jeff]

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

Years ago I got sent to a site running an AT&T 3B2 400 and was told it was completely down so I’d need to reload it.   I was also told they had no backup tapes so we’d have to configure it like a new server.  Never having actually installed a 3B2 400 I was not really sure how to do that but I took the AT&T manuals and some media along with me.

The first thing I noticed when I got to the site was that the console was sitting at a login prompt.   I found it let me login as root.   Clearly someone had removed many of the files (all of our proprietary software and the sites data) along with a few other things..

The second thing I discovered while looking to see if they had a recent data backup was that they in fact had a root (/) and a /usr (where our software lived) backup tapes buried in a box of tapes even though they’d told us they didn’t have such tapes.   I quickly restore / and /usr then found the most recent data tape (which by then was a day old) and restored it.

Within about an hour of arriving on site I had the system up and running.   The site had to re-input the last day’s data by hand but even at that they treated me like a hero because prior to my arrival our management had advised them they’d be down for at least 2-3 days for the rebuild then would have to re-input most of the data for the current year to get back to where they’d been.

P.S.  Whoever invented CTCCPIO for the 3B2 400 should have been shot.   That wasn’t compatible with any other backup/restore utility.   Switching sites over to 3B2 600 or 1000 by doing a uucp over serial was NOT what you call “fast”.






________________________________
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Rich Faulkner
Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 10:13 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] almost OT: Unix Recovery Legend

Never seen that before.  That's totally awesome!  Thanks for sharing........


On Tue, 2011-11-22 at 09:53 -0500, Boris Borisov wrote:



http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html

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