Hello trixbox team.
Love your work.
I was wondering if anyone had any ideas to add a plugin that would allow trixbox users to ghost there server to an onboard dvd drive or to network attached storag?
Any one have any ideas for software? Opensource or Free?
Try Ghost for Unix. Don't think you can do an online backup however.
Rehan
Another remote backup application that is nice is Storage Grid. It's free for use up to 3 machines. I haven't used it with *nix yet, but I have used the Windows version and it works nicely. www.vembu.com
rquick:
I was wondering if anyone had any ideas to add a plugin that would allow trixbox users to ghost there server to an onboard dvd drive or to network attached storag?
Trixbox runs on linux. You do not need any special tools like ghost to make backups. good old cp will do the job just fine. I prefer to use rsync with a combination of ssh to backup all of my non-windows machine to one computer. Recovery is a breeze. Give me a day or two and I will clean up my script for you.
JC
JC, when you post that script, can you include some notes on why you did things the way you did? I know some of us (me) are still in the learning phase and will soak up any bits of knowledge thrown at us... :-D
Undrhil
I too need a solution to completely backup my system. I want to use Ghost, but it errors on me with CRC errors when I use Ghost 8.0. I'm told that 8.3 supports some distros, but the person wasn't sure if CentOS was one of them. I'd love to try it. I tried g4L and it works, but on an 80 gig drive, it takes hours as I couldn't get file mode to clone the drive to another installed drive. Maybe if someone had detailed instructions on how to use file mode, so that I could avoid "click-n-clone".... but it would be nice to clone to a DVD, then to restore, one simply inserts a dvd on a blank hard drive and restore takes place. That would avoid a trip to a satellite office in case of a disk failure. Maybe a module to create an ISO image of the entire HD?
Maybe a script the Trixbox people use to create their ISO's for distribution... I don't know, just thinking on my keyboard.
John
Yeah that script would be extremely helpful, i ahd a similar problem with asterisk@home, i could do the backup but couldnt get it to another machine or cd etc.
So yeah can you give a few instructions and hints on why you chose to do backups this way, i also am learning..
Daniel
You guys might want to try using netcat or dd if you want to ghost an entire drive. You typically need to boot off a live cd like Knoppix and mount the drive read only. Google around for backups using netcat or dd and you should be able to come up with some pretty basic scripts. I found this one off the bat: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/saw27/notes/backup-hard-disk-partitions.html. It has a one line command using dd to back up the drive, gzip it, and then ssh it off to somewhere else.
All of these solutions look great, but none of them backup to DVD. This would give me the ability to keep onsite backups of each install. I currently have 14 facilities running traditional PBX systems, but I am planning to use trixbox if it will meet my needs.
Does anyone else know of any software that I can boot with a floppy and ghost the entire drive to DVD? I think I have reached the end of the web.
Thanks,
Randy Q
Acronis True Image for Linux.
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/products/ATISLin/
Very Expensive but will do everything that you want and more with the server running live as well.
Alan
I found this. Just had not te time to try, but according to the site this should be usefull.
Philip
Yeah the Acronis stuff is really very good. Very polished. It gets my vote. It is kept very up to date.
I use Acronis for everything I can these days as I have come to depend on its reliability. I just hasn't broken anything yet. The disk partitioning and the imaging software have replaced fdisk, ghost, Norton etc etc in my toolbox.
Yes Acronis get my vote two for all there Disk products.
Symantec buy out everyone then don't sceem to develop
the products.
Alan
I run my trixbox in a VM (VMWare Virtual Machine) and so while i do use the backup script in FreePBX - I also take a snapshot of the VM about once a week or so.
I had my hands on BartPE with Norton Ghost, G4L, G4U, Part Image, Knoppix, Ubuntu,
Every one of these had one or more problems like: can’t support EXT3, can’t boot from a CDROM connected to PCMCIA slot, discover different PCMCIA NICs ( my TRXbox on a laptop), create the backup in less then an hour for 10G drive, restore to a smaller drive.
After all combination of Acronics True Image home addition and Super Grub disk is what works for me: Acronics TI has discovered any hardware configurations I tested so far and saved images to network, restored on any drive.
For my 10G drive backup or restore takes about 20min.
Only problem was to reload Grub if the restore has been done on the different size drive,
The SGd works fine, takes less than 3 min to fix the bootloader.
I had my hands on BartPE with Norton Ghost, G4L, G4U, Part Image, Knoppix, Ubuntu,
Every one of these had one or more problems like: can’t support EXT3, can’t boot from a CDROM connected to PCMCIA slot, discover different PCMCIA NICs ( my TRXbox on a laptop), create the backup in less then an hour for 10G drive, restore to a smaller drive.
After all combination of Acronics True Image home addition and Super Grub disk is what works for me: Acronics TI has discovered any hardware configurations I tested so far and saved images to network, restored on any drive.
For my 10G drive backup or restore takes about 20min.
Only problem was to reload Grub if the restore has been done on the different size drive,
The SGd works fine, takes less than 3 min to fix the bootloader.
Hi, could'nt help reading this post as I too, am interested in a complete machine backup, (ie: something like ghosting), is what I am trying to achieve. But my problem is, as I am new to *nux, this post looks like it can help me do just this.
When you have completed this script, would it be possible to share it with us, and some simple instructions for using it in both a backup & recovery mode.
Thanks
Jon
Add another vote for Acronis TrueImage. Makes image backups, writes to network shares, good, fast, cheap, I'm moving my backup strategies away from Ghost Enterprise and over to Acronis.
Note that you don't need one of the expensive versions of TI, the Home version builds a bootable CD that does everything you need.
This method from NerdVittles uses rsync
http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=89
Though, it doesn't address the OP regarding DVD.
I have several AAH & TB systems in production. Each system has a spare cloned system disk ready to go.
To clone the TB System Disk with Acronis True Image Home
Install "Acronis True Image Home" on a windows box
Create a "bootable rescue media disk".
Install a new Disk in the TB system and boot from the "bootable rescue media disk".
Select Clone Disk, Automatic, Source and Destination Disk.
Remove the old disk and boot the TB system with the new drive.
If the Source and Destination Disks are not the same size you may need to strap the bootloader.
Boot from ether an AAH or TB CD.
Press "F5" at the first screen.
Enter: linux rescue
Select Your language, Country and no network option
Enter: chroot /mnt/sysimage
If the drive is installed as Master on the first IDE controller enter:
grub-install /dev/hda
If the drive is slave on the first IDE controller enter:
grub-install /dev/hdb
If the drive is installed as Master on the 2nd IDE controler enter:
grub-install /dev/hdc
If the drive is slave on the 2d IDE controller enter:
grub-install /dev/hdd
---
Another alternative that works, but can be a bit of a challenge to configure on some machines is MkCDRec (http://mkcdrec.org) It's free and will create a bootable ISO restore image for a CD or DVD.
I have used it to create a restore CD and it seems to work well.
Andrew
I found whqt I needed. Ghost 8.3 works beautifully. You can resize your partitions when restoring, and it doesn't copy empty space. It will also write directly to a DVD, and make the DVD bootable. I can restore a complete Trixbox system from an un-formatted hard drive to making phone calls in 5 minutes. My USB hard drive has all the images on it, and I can boot from a CD with USB 2.0 drivers installed, and restore at better than 500 MB per minute. Only 8.3 works, for the earlier versions of Ghost do not support variable cluster sizes. I have a solution for using Ghost 8.0 however... You can modify the cluster size of the file system without destroying any data. Let me warn you, it's better to purchase Ghost 8.3 and use that as your backup, and I HAVE tried this and it works, but I can't be held responsible if this fails. Use at your own risk.
here it is:
Log on the system and edit /etc/selinux/config.
Replace SELINUX=enforced by SELINUX=disabled. If you don't disable
SELinux, the ext_attr will be set again on the root filesystem the
next time you boot and every file created or modified will have its
extended ACL entries set.
Step 2
Download e2fsprogs-libs-1.39.tar.gz from SourceForge. Click on the following
link:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/e2fsprogs
Step 3
Untar, compile and install the new utilities:
tar -zxf e2fsprogs-libs-1.39.tar.gz
cd e2fsprogs-libs-1.39
./configure
make
make install
Step 4
Reboot the system in single-user mode:
type reboot
at the GRUB splash screen, press enter then press the 'a' and
add the word single at the end of the command line (there's a space
between quiet and single)
Step 5
Unmount all filesystems, including /, and remove both resize_inode
and ext_attr features. Run the following commands on all filesystems:
debugfs -w /dev/XXXX -R "features ^resize_inode ^ext_attr"
e2fsck -y -f /dev/XXXX
Example:
/dev/hda1 is mounted on /boot
/dev/hda2 is mounted on /
/dev/sda5 is mounted on /home
umount /boot
umount /
umount /home
debugfs -w /dev/hda1 -R "features ^resize_inode ^ext_attr"
debugfs -w /dev/hda2 -R "features ^resize_inode ^ext_attr"
debugfs -w /dev/hda5 -R "features ^resize_inode ^ext_attr"
e2fsck -y -f /dev/hda1
e2fsck -y -f /dev/hda2
e2fsck -y -f /dev/hda5
Running e2fsck on the root filesystem takes a while.
Step 6
Reboot the system.
During shutdown, you will get error messages telling you that the
root filesystem cannot be written. That's normal because the root
filesystem is still mounted read-only. It must remain mounted read-
only during shutdown.
During boot, you will get a message telling you that the system was
not properly shutdown and ask you if you want to verify the
filesystem integrity. You can skip this step. It didn't find anything
wrong on my system.
Your system is now ready to be Ghosted.
link to the bugzilla report
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzill...g.cgi?id=145307
I'm curious to know what type of setup you have with asterisk and vmware? I would like to use VMware too, but we have a couple T1's and digium cards in our box and I haven't been able to figure the drivers and such (zaptel).
A recent Linux Journal mentioned Mondoarchive and Mondorescue as a way to backup/restore a Linux box, and it looked Perfect for backing up my Trixboxes - It can use hard drive, CD, DVD, or tape, it's live - i.e., you don't have to take it out of production, and it makes bootable CD/DVD's - It will also do a partial restore all the way up to a Bare-Metal restore.
Here is their website:
They don't have a package for CentOS, and I have been trying to get it going from Source, but it is throwing a weird error, so I can't attest to how well it works yet - Has anyone else tried it? It is in the package tree for Ubuntu/Debian, so if anyone is running these, it's just an apt get away...
Greg
I just tried doing a backup of a trixbox 2.0 using Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1 onto a SMB network share, then I restored the backup to a different hard drive (about twice the size) - also running over the network.
No problems. You just have to make sure you select the option to restore the MBR or it'll skip the boot loader.
There is a "home" version of true image but it doesn't support network backup or restore (though it can go to a burner) but I didn't test that one.
i assume you had to reboot the trixbox on the acronis CD and do the backup that way? if not, i'm confused, since the docs say acronis workstation only supports windows. if you did reboot, i guess i have to try something else, since this is a production box and i can't have it down for 2-3 hours while doing a backup...
I use Mondoarchive on a few machines. it works great. I created a DVD, which boots. Boot from it select Nuke and your off to the races.
I also dump my mondo images to my fileserver via NFS. Then all you need is a simple mondo bootable cd, boot and elect your nfsmount and your off I have alos used mondorestore to restore my asterisk mysql dbs when I messed something up. worked like a charm
Jim
I use Acronis True Image Workstation. The Home version has some limitations including the inability to write to DVD.
It works great. Create rescue media on DVD, boot the Trixbox server from the DVD and create an image to the same DVD or a separate one if you want.
I could not get any of the pre v9 Ghost versions to work. Never tried v9-v10. It couldn't seem to handle ext3 file systems even thought it detected it and said it knew what it was doing with it. They would always be corrupted.
Have you guys seen the Mondorescue project? That looks like a promising alternative
http://www.trixbox.org/forums/trixbox-forums/help/mondo-rescue-ba...
yes, to use Acronis you have to shut down the system and boot off a CD. The mondo script is nice as it allows you to do it "live" but it creates the ISO files on the hard drive it's backing up - meaning you need 2x the hard drive space.
I believe there is some compression going on. I tried imaging a pristine trixbox 2.2 using the mondorescue procedure and it came out to just under 500MB for the main ISO +about 80MB for the boot ISO.
Jim,
Have you done anything with Mondo involving changing disk architecture for the restore? I am looking at using Mondo Archive to backup my Trixbox system so I can "restore it" into a new machine. I'm not sure if this would even work, since it's a different type processor, but I figured if I did the normal trixbox install and then used mondo to restore my asterisk, trixbox and freepbx stuff, it should all work correctly, yes?
Just a thought. :)
Haven't had to much experience using Acronis, but for me mondo archive has been the way to go. Here is the method that I use on all of my important servers:
Rsync for daily backup of data that changes on a daily basis
Mondo for clone/snapshot of system before and after major changes (ie. upgrade to trixbox or underlying system)
Here is how I run it from the command line:
# Backup to iso file/for cd-write - exclude everything under /home
# (rsync takes care of that) and place the newly minted iso files in /home/backup
mondoarchive -Oi -d /home/backup -E /home -s 650m
# Same as above but to iso file/for dvd-write
mondoarchive -Oi -d /home/backup -E /home -s 4200m
After you have run make sure you not only grab the iso files it creates, but there is an additional one which I believe is the mindi/mondo boot disk that you need as well (do not forget it it is the initial disk you boot with). It will tell you after it runs where that boot disk is located. From there get those iso files off the system using ftp, rsync, samba, whatever and then burn the cd/dvd on your desktop.
You can use mondo to clone a system and then use the cds/dvds to restore on a system with totally different hardware IF your kernel has support for that different hardware. If you anticipate restoring your clone in that type of scenario make sure you learn how to build your own custom kernels.
For installation which can be the tricky part see:
http://www.trixbox.org/forums/trixbox-forums/help/mondo-rescue-ba...
For better information on mondo and trixbox:
http://www.script-trix.us/diskbackup.htm
Paul Smith
Script-trix.us has a couple of scripts posted for doing backups. I know the full system backup script uses Mondo, not sure about the Daily backup. Anyway, those scripts allow for sending the .iso files to a FTP site, a USB drive or an SMB share. It's very nice to be able to just run a script and then come back later and grab the .iso files to burn them.
The fullbackup script even breaks all of the main options out to variables (the script and site call them 'sentinels') so if you want it to backup to FTP, just select that variable and set it to one. If you want it to email you the log file, just set that variable to 1 as well. Very simple stuff. :)
So I was was very interested in backing up an image of trixbox. Did anyone find a good solution to back up to DVD? I looked into Acronis, however I was looking for something free. I was able to use Clonezilla to copy from device-to-device, but I would like to have a DVD option as well.
Thanks in advance,
Jose
Take a look at a this ISO called PING
It properly supports xfer of the grub boot loader
Scott
aka "Skyking"
You may also consider HDClone
http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html#free
The free basic one is more than ample for this purpose.
Member Since:
2006-06-07