AIX 5.3 – Howto backup operating system to a bootable ISO image

aix

We would like to backup the AIX 5.3 IntelliStation at our company. Unfortunately it does not have a tapedrive nor a DVD-Writer. It only has a DVD-ROM drive.

The idea is to mount a directory via NFS and to create an ISO image there. Afterwards We would use a different machine to create a bootable DVD from the ISO image.

How can this be done? I have tried the mkdvd command from a smitty terminal, but it seems that mkdvd does not accept a filename, e.g. /nfsmount/aixbackup/system-image.iso.

Any help on this is very appreciated!

Best Answer

Mkdvd can be used for this.
It will take the rootvg (or a backup made with mksysb) and will write it on the specified device.

To create a bootable dvd, you can simply use the following:

mkdvd -d /dev/cd1

You should have a look at mkdvd, mksysb and savevg documentation before doing anything nasty on your server..

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AIX: Howto setup a new /home directory on a new harddrive

Meanwhile I found a solution for the topic mentioned. But I would like to let others know how I did that.

I found this great description from a guy whose name is "Ryan".

see: Ryan's AIX description

The only thing I had to change was: use jfs instead of jfs2 (for whatever reason).

Here is a summary of the commands I used to get this working:

1. mkvg -y homevg hdisk1                    # create a new volume group on the new/free  harddisk
2. mklv -t jfslog -y loghomevg homevg 1     # prepare log for the new filesystem
3. mklv -t jfs    -y    homelv homevg 64G   # prepare a 64G partition for the new /home
4. mkfs -o log=/dev/loghomevg  -V jfs /dev/homelv # create new jfs filesystem.
5. mkdir /home2                             # create a mountpoint for the new filesystem
6. chown bin:bin /home2                     # set ownership according to /home
7. mount -o log=/dev/loghomevg  /dev/homelv /home2 # mount the new filesystem

Note: in (4) you have to answer with "Yes". Afterwards it will take a while to complete.

After all that I copied the original content of the /home directory to /home2. I did so by using gnu tar, but other approaches should also work:

cd /home
gtar -cvpf - * | gtar -C /home2 -xpf -

you are done now!

finally you could unmount /home and use /home2 as the new /home directory, e.g. by modifying /etc/filesystems appropriately. Alternatively you could assign a new home directory to the users defined in /etc/passwd, e.g. use /home2/buildsys instead of /home/buildsys

Installing gcc on AIX 5.3

Quick search on google reveals that there are some pre-made packages for AIX - gcc 4.2.x and various other tools from GNU world...

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/linux/toolbox/download.html

http://www.google.pl/search?q=gcc+4.2+aix

Best Answer

Related Solutions

AIX: Howto setup a new /home directory on a new harddrive

Installing gcc on AIX 5.3

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