Friday Fine-Tune: Creating the perfect CSLT
April 7, 2017
Editor's note: A classic technique, detailed here by the NewsWire's Hidden Value editor emeritus John Burke.
A question about creating a CSLT for a Disaster Recovery test turned into a general discussion about what the perfect CSLT should look like. A system manager wanted to use the STORE option on the SYSGEN TAPE command to store additional files onto the CSLT he was creating for his DR test but was running into trouble trying to specify STORE options as part of the SYSGEN TAPE command. In particular, he wanted to simply add ;SHOW to get a listing of all files stored.
The answer to his original question is to use an indirect file, as in
sysgen>TAPE MODE=VERBOSE DEST=OFFLINE STORE=
^CSLT.INDIRECT.SYS
where the indirect file contains whatever STORE directives you want in addition to the file list.
One contributor recommended robust efforts to get a listing: “A backup tape is of limited value without a listing. For Disaster Recovery purposes it is also a good idea to have the original HP tapes and patches with you as it is possible to create an SLT that does not install or work on a different HP 3000 system.” This same contributor also suggested creating a disk file with a listing of all the stored files.
However, several people questioned whether this list of files which the thread originator had proposed storing was sufficient. Stan Sieler probably said it best:
“I’d put much more in the STORE section, at the minimum:
/SYS - /SYS/MPEXL/DUMPAREA - /SYS/PUB/NL - /SYS/PUB/SL -/SYS/PUB/XL
(To explain, NL, SL, XL are dumped in the CSLT portion, so no need to dump them in the STORE section; DUMPAREA is a 32Mb file created at INSTALL time and there’s absolutely no need to dump it to a tape.)
/TELESUP - /TELESUP/DUMPS
(or wherever you put your dumps.)
/ALLEGRO, /LPSTOOLS, /REGO, /ROBELLE, /VESOFT
(It’s surprising how much you might want tools at an early stage.)
“If most of your user data is in one or two accounts, other than SYS, TELESUP, and the rest of the system might fit well onto one DDS/DLT, you might find it more useful to do:
/ - /USERS - /SALES
(where USERS, SALES are the ‘user’ accounts)
“Why? It guarantees you’ll get everything you’re likely to need in a recovery/install situation (except, of course, for the major portion of the user’s data). I’d also specify:
;show;directory=MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET,…etc.; progress;partialdb