Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Hi,

Just wanted to say hello.

I received my first SGI today.
It's an O2, R5K 200.

Sadly It got banged up during shipping. cracks in the plastic shell.
But it seems to work, boots up!

I live in Stockholm, Sweden.

Anyways, I thought my first mission would be to make a complete backup of the system as it came freshly installed.
It was missing the second hdd sled so I cant clone the system over to a spare hdd that I have.

I was thinking of making a backup over NFS to my linux server.
And then swapping hdd and boot from the Irix install cd and restoring the entire system.
Do I need some special applications for backup and restore, or are they included in a standard IRIX installation?

Thanks in advance!

/Daniel

PS. got myself a Sun blade 100 also about a week ago, I understand that there are people using Sun mashines here also?

hi damiga,

welcome here and yes we got some sun related parts, too. a good start here is either the forum search or the wiki which has things like this: http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/Clone_System_Disk
as usual "search first, ask later" goes here as well. as quite an old site we got a lot of stuff surely worth checking out

enjoy the ride and congrats on your 2 new machines

Welcome!

You've got lots of choices that come with Irix, some of which are even covered by the Nekochan Wiki.

Backup and Restore Manager for a GUI http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/Backup_and_Restore_Manager

xfsdump or even just cpio for command-line http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/XFS#Native_backup.2Frestore_utilities

You could clone the whole disk http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/Clone_System_Disk

I've used xfsdump to make a backup and store it on another machine and Backup and Restore Manager for backing up to a tape drive in my Onyx2, although it's been a while so I don't remember many details. It wasn't too hard to figure out. There's also documentation from SGI on it, probably on your workstation. It's one of the Admin guides.

In addition to the Nekochan resources the other posters have mentioned, I'll add that Ian Mapleson's site has additional information at http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgi.html#ADMIN . There's tons of stuff on his site that you'll probably find useful if you're new to SGIs and IRIX.

Hi Damiga. Welcome to the forums.

If you are a bit patient I might be able to get you a new skin.

Edit: And, er, the "skin" is what we usually call the fragile plastic on our dear SGI machines.

Thanks Pontus!

I'd really appreciate that, let me know when you have something available. No rush though =)

Anyways, back on topic. I've done a bit of searching and managed to do a backup from the, eh, "system manager" i believe it was called. The backup was made to a nfs-share on a linux server.

I then swapped the drives, made new filesystem with fx after booting from cd.
Now i figured I could restore from the "recover system" option, but it seems like it only accepts tape drives, which I don't have.
So i dropped into a shell and tried mounting tha backup folder with NFS so i could use cpio, but no go with mounting folder.
# mount -t nfs 192.168.1.10:mnt/sdc1/nfs /restore
mount:cannot get filehandle for 192.168.1.10:mnt/sdc1/nfs - Permission denied
mount: giving up on: /restore

So, anyone got any pointers? been searching for about two hours straight here.
Is there another route I should choose?

Shouldn't that be:

Unless you made a typo in your post, you need that first slash after the colon in the remote filespec. So that first.

The other question is whether or not you exported that volume from your Linux box. I have something like this on a CentOS Linux box here:

You don't need the network restriction, but if you keep it adjust for your 192.168.1.0/24 (I'm guessing) network. Check your man pages for exportfs(1m), exports(5), and showmount(1m) to hash the rest of it out. Or there's undoubtedly a well-written section of doc on TechPubs, maybe in the Linux Doc Project, if I bestirred myself to find it...

if i try:
mount -t nfs 192.168.1.10:/mnt/sdc1/nfs /restore
or
mount 192.168.1.10:/mnt/sdc1/nfs /restore

it says:
nfs: invalid argument

I also tried setting the export options to the same as yours, except the ip ofc.

NFS is actually a separate subsystem in IRIX, so it's possible you just don't have it installed.
You can check that with "versions | fgrep nfs".

Well the disk is freshly formatted so nothing installed at all.
I'm booting from the installation CD with the option "recover system" from prom and then dropping into a shell.

So perhaps there's no support for NFS when i've booted it like that?
Which would explain why it doesn't work

Thanks for the links!
I''ve browsed through those but since I dont have an extra hd sled, and no tape drive, I need to be able to fetch the backup archive over NFS.
Unless there's an alternative to NFS to access a backup archive over the network?

Ok now I managed to make a temporary "sled" so I can have the new hard drive connected at slot 2, so I'll go forward with a clone of the drive.

Thanks for your input ppl!

Oh


That's probably the best option, good luck

Yes! it worked, clone successful and system booted on the new drive!

BTW, this site doesn't work in netscape 4.05

Actually, it doesn't work until at least Mozilla 1.6 due to changes in how CSS overflow is computed.

If you ever find yourself needing to clone again or want periodically re-cloning your working drive, BetXen created a very nice commented script that'll walk walks you through the process (not to mention minimize the opportunity for transcription typos): viewtopic.php?f=10&t=11322

There's also an oldish version of bacula in nekoware. I kind of got distracted by too many internal compiler errors while building qt 4.something, so for now, I won't provide an updated package. Maybe someone else wants to step in?