[OpenAFS] Server recovery

[Moose Finklestein]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 17:29:36 -0400, Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz@cmu.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
> 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?  
> 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...

On the one hand, we also back up our /usr/afs/db directories.  We do
it by a) making sure we're not using the sync-site and b) turning off
the PT/VL servers before copying the files.

> 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.

On the other hand, that's [censored] nifty. I just may switch to this.

e.