Your JoeDog loves rear! And who doesn’t, amirite?

Except it’s not that rear. It’s an acronym for Relax and Recover, a Linux bare metal recovery tool.

Your JoeDog has been using Mondo for cloning systems. It’s good software that served him well despite difficulties moving from one hardware set to another. If Your JoeDog archived sd disks and recovered to cciss, then he was knee deep in i-want-my-lvm hell.

Rear makes those type of migrations much easier. If you archive a server using one type of disk driver and recover it to one that requires another, rear reworks the disk layout for you. It’s also configured to ignore external disks. If you archive a server connected to a SAN, rear simply ignores those multipath devices.

Like Mondo, you can archive and recover from an NFS server. Here’s a suggested configuration for NFS archiving. Place these directives inside /etc/rear/local.conf

OUTPUT=ISO
BACKUP=NETFS
NETFS_URL=nfs://10.37.72.44/export
NETFS_OPTIONS=rw,nolock,noatime
OUTPUT_URL=file:///export

To archive the system, run ‘rear -v mkbackup’

This configuration creates an ISO image called ‘rear-hostname.iso’ inside 10.37.72.44/export/hostname. To recover the server, burn that ISO onto a CD and boot the system with it. Select the Recover option then run ‘rear recover’ at the command prompt.

“It’s that simple,” Your JoeDog said with the zeal of a recent convert. He’ll be back to bitch about rear in a couple weeks but for now it’s nothing but love….