HP Certified: HP-UX System Administration

23.6 Using Ignite -UX

Ignite-UX is an additional software package that is used to recover a system from a damaged boot disk. No data can be restored if you are not able to boot a system, as commands for restoring data can be executed only on a running system. The Ignite-UX package contains commands to create a bootable tape. The bootable tape contains all critical system and configuration files so that a minimal system can be rebuilt using this tape. The necessary components of a recovery tape are the image of the boot area of the system boot disk, root volume group ( vg00 ), and critical system files.

Creating a Recovery Tape

If you have installed the Ignite-UX package on your system, you can use the /opt/ignite/bin/make_recovery command to create a recovery tape. Other than the boot area of the system disk, the following four directories are completely backed up by default.

• the /stand directory containing the HP-UX kernel

• the /sbin directory containing commands and scripts used at boot time

• the /dev directory containing device files including those for the root volume group

• the /etc directory containing configuration information

Some selected files from other partitions are also backed up. To create a full recovery tape of all files in vg00 , use the -A option with the command. A typical command to create a recovery disk is shown here.

/opt/ignite/bin/make_recovery -A -C -v -d /dev/rmt/0m

or, since /dev/rmt/0m is the default, just use:

/opt/ignite/bin/make_recovery -A -C -v

or even more simply

/opt/ignite/bin/make_recovery -ACv

This command creates a full recovery on the tape device. The -C option is used to create a log file consisting of information about backed-up files. This log file is used when updating a recovery tape. The log file name is /var/opt/ignite/recovery/makerec.last .

Updating a Recovery Tape

You can use the check_recovery command at any time to check if a new Ignite-UX recovery tape is needed. This command compares system files with the information contained in the Ignite-UX log file. Before using this command, there must be a previous recovery tape created using the -C option. If the command reports that some system files have been changed, you can create a recovery tape again. The check_recovery command should be run from time to time.