[OpenAFS] Server recovery

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Monday, October 25, 2004 10:58:22 -0700 Renata Maria Dart 
<renata@slac.stanford.edu> wrote:

> Hi Jeff, we create a backup of the entire /usr/afs/db directory
> every night (and in addition every night we make a copy of the
> boot drive of our database servers onto an alternate drive).
> Is there anything more to be gained by using pt_util?  What is
> the difference between making a copy of /usr/afs/db/prdb.DB and
> prdb.DBSYS1, and running pt_util?  Also, is there documentation
> (besides pt_util -h) for this command?

Merely copying the database file is not atomic, so there's the chance when 
you make a copy that it will not be internally consistent.  If you use 
pt_util, it will check the database version before and after the dump, and 
print a warning if they are not the same.  Of course, this only helps if 
you notice the warning...

In addition, the dump file created by pt_util is (more or less) human 
readable.  So, if an admin accidentally deletes himself, you can read the 
latest dump to see what his PTS ID was and what groups he was in.

No, I don't think there is any documentation.  As I recall, pt_util was 
originally an internal tool developed at MIT, which was contributed to 
OpenAFS as-is.

-- Jeff