Timothy
Parker Consulting Incorporated
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Cactus Air-Bag and Lone-Tar for UnixWare Cactus International and Lone Star Software have been well
know to OpenServer administrators for their excellent Lone-Tar and Air-Bag
utilities. Now, both are available
for UnixWare. Air-Bag is a disaster
recovery system that allows you to use floppies or other removable media to
recover from a critical system crash. Lone-Tar
is a backup and restore utility that works with practically any media and
device. We’ve grouped both
Lone-Tar and Air-Bag for UnixWare together in this First Look, although they are
available separately. Air-Bag is almost a mandatory part of any administrator’s
toolbox, at least for those of us who manage many systems and hate reloading
everything from scratch. After a
severe system crash (one where the operating system won’t load) all you need
to restart and reload the UnixWare server is an Air-Bag diskette and a recent
backup of the filesystem. The
Air-Bag diskette provides a mini operating systems environment with drivers to
access the disk subsystems and backup media device (usually a tape drive).
After the system crashes, insert the Air-Bag diskette, boot from the
diskette, and follow the prompts. It really can be that simple. A recent system crash on our test UnixWare 7.1 system proves
it (after we loaded some new disk drivers that corrupted the operating system
and boot partition). Before we
crashed the system we had created our Air-Bag recovery diskette and continued
our daily incremental backup schedule to an HP DAT drive.
After the crash, we booted from the Air-Bag diskette, inserted the SCSI
card driver diskette when prompted, and then fed the full backup tape and latest
incrementals when asked, and three hours later our system was fully operating
again with no lost data. The UnixWare version of Air-Bag has lots of extra features
that allow you to tailor your recovery process. It supports all three BTLD formats, as well as the UnixWare
HBA drivers disk. Air-Bag has a mini Device Control Unit that allows for
on-the-fly setting of IRQs, DMAs, and memory addresses (so you can get your
devices back on line). And a really neat feature: you can dump the diskette
drives and create a bootable CD-ROM (assuming your BIOS allows CD booting).
The menu-driven interface is improved over the older OpenServer Air-Bag
version we had on hand, and there’s a ton of new features specifically
tailored to UnixWare. For complete
details, you should check the Cactus Web home page. Lone-Tar is the quintessential third-party backup and
restore utility. Lone-Tar has been
around for a decade now, and has a legion of dedicated fans.
Version 3.2 (for both UnixWare and OpenServer) adds some new features all
in the same easy-to-use menu-driven interface.
The fast seek feature we raved about in an earlier Lone-Tar First Look is
available for UnixWare and makes all the backup and restore tasks a joy.
System administrators have a choice of several backup utilities these
days, but we still find Lone-Tar to be one of the cleanest most capable systems
we have used. UnixWare administrators can now have the best two utilities from
Cactus, and that’s something to be glad about. Cactus International Summary: The excellent Cactus Air-Bag and Lone Star Lone-Tar utilities of OpenServer fame are finally available for UnixWare. Quintessential administration tools! |
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Send mail to
tparker@tpci.com with
questions or comments about this web site.
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