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avanti's TaskMaster ®

User Submitted Sample Task
Contributed by: Dick Knowles (UK)
(Posted: 05 March 2002)



Purpose
Transfer the SYS: Volume to a New Drive

Overview
This procedure was used as a result of a change of policy in the way that we laid out our volumes. Previously, we had stored our applications on the system volumes. The nature of our business meant that the amount of disc space required for applications had grown to about 8 GB and was continuing to grow. If ever we needed to upgrade our operating system, or disaster recover, this meant that the recovery time for the Sys volume was growing. We decided that the solution was to dedicate a pair of 9 GB disc drives as a mirrored Sys volume. Moving the Applications onto another volume on other drives was easy, the difficult part was to move the Sys volume into a smaller partition.

Non-TaskMaster Procedure
We did this on one of our servers before we bought Taskmaster. This used the following procedure:

  1. Make sure that tape backups had finished successfully the previous night
  2. Use TBackup on all volumes to preserve Trustee status
  3. Take all drives off-line except one of the Sys mirror drives
  4. Delete the Sys volume and C:\NWServer.
  5. Install Netware (5.0) from CD
  6. Bring on-line the other drive containing the previous Sys volume after renaming it as Sys1
  7. Apply all previously applied Netware patches (that had been stored on that drive)
  8. Rename the Sys:System\Nici directory
  9. XCopy the whole of the previous Sys volume to the new Sys volume
  10. Rename the copied Nici directory as Nici.Old and the new directory back to Nici
  11. At the DOS prompt XCopy the old C: drive to the new C: drive.
  12. Put one of the drives from each other mirror pair on-line
  13. Restart Netware
  14. Run DSRepair to clear Trustee rights with old object IDs
  15. Run all the TRestore.Bat files created by TBackup
  16. Change ownership of all users' Home directory files
  17. After a day or two, bring the mirror drives back on-line and remirror.
This took about 4 hours at the weekend. It required the fall-back Sys volume to be brought on-line and put at risk. It required a lot of testing to make sure that the procedure would work (the bit about Nici was not documented by either Novell or Veritas). I suspect that there are a lot of variants depending on precisely which version of Netware, NDS and patches are in use. It would be possible to use a tape restore for steps 9 and 11, but this would require the extra step of reinstalling backup software. NB. If backup software disaster recovery actually worked, that would make the process far simpler.

If the new Sys volume needed to be bigger than the old volume, we would have used Netware's partition mirroring to replicate the existing Sys volume to the new drive, then removed the old drive and added another volume segment to Sys. This is much easier and safer.

TaskMaster Procedure
We then did the process at another site using TaskMaster as follows:

  1. The drives to which Sys was to be transferred were installed and configured as RAID mirror drives
  2. A DOS partition was created and formatted as bootable
  3. A Netware partition was created covering the rest of the drives
  4. A Sys1 volume was created on the whole of the partition.
    (I tried creating a dummy Netware partition the size of the required DOS partition followed by a Netware partition for Sys. I then deleted the dummy partition and tried subsequently to create a DOS partition in this space. This failed for some reason).
  5. During the week, we set up a task file containing the command:
    XCopy Sys:\*.* Sys1:\*.* /e /h /i /t /s >sys:\usr.log
  6. This job was then scheduled to run at 6:00 am Saturday morning. This needs to be early enough to finish before we come in and is best delayed until tape backups have finished.
  7. Before leaving on Friday evening, power down/remove one drive of each old mirror pair (to give a fall-back)
  8. On arrival, check the tape backup log to ensure a good backup is available
  9. Copy the log file to a PC Workstation, then login at this Workstation as Workstation only
  10. Disconnect the server from the Network
  11. Run the command:
    XCopy Sys:\_Netware\*.* Sys1:\_Netware\*.* /e /h /i /t /s >sys:\nw.log
    (this is quick)
  12. Copy the new log to floppy for access on the Workstation
  13. Search both logs for failed file copies. For each file that failed: "File Close Sys:pathname\filename", "XCopy Sys:pathname\filename Sys1:pathname\filename /h /t".
  14. Exit to DOS prompt and "XCopy c:\*.* d:\*.* /s /e /h"
  15. Remove the drive containing the old sys volume
  16. Start Netware - It will fail because there is no sys volume.
  17. Using NWConfig, rename Sys1 as Sys.
    (You could do "Server -ns" and rename Sys as Sys2, Sys1 as Sys)
  18. Down, reconnect to network and restart
  19. After a day or two bring the other mirror drives back on-line and remirror.
This took less than an hour and fall-back options were safer. It may be possible to include the _Netware copy in the overnight task and omit the disconnection from the network. We failed on two weekends because my instructions to the remote operator were not clear enough. The copies of the open files were attempted without the "/h /t" switches, which was probably the cause of the failures. We had previously tested the process by taking mirror drives from the on-line system and testing in a stand-alone box.