Fine-tune Friday: Moving systems quickly
September 8, 2017
Here in the 14th year after HP stopped building 3000s, customers continue to use them. They use them up, too, and when that happens it's time to move a system from one machine to another. Here's some timeless advice from a net.digest column of the NewsWire on how to move quickly.
How do you move a large system from one machine to a completely new system, including disk drives, in the quickest way possible and minimizing downtime? In this particular case, it is a 7x24 shop and its online backup to a DLT4000 takes 16 hours.
Stan Sieler came up with an interesting approach to this particular problem, an approach that can be extended to solve a variety of problems in large 7x24 shops.
• Buy a Seagate external disk drive.
• Configure the Seagate on both the old system and the new system.
• Connect the Seagate on the old system.
• volutil/newset the Seagate to be a new volume set, “XFER” (REMEMBER: Volume set names can and should be short names!)
• Do one (or more) STORE-to-disks using compression with the target disk being the new Seagate drive.
• When the entire system is backed up onto the XFER disk, VSCLOSE it and unplug it (Caution: The safest approach is to power off your system first.)
• Attach the new disk to the new system (see caution above) and reboot.
• Set up the XFER group on the new system.
:newgroup xfer.sys
:altgroup xfer.sys; homevs=XFER
• restore the data
:file xferA; dev=99 (or whatever ldev XFER is)
:restore *xferA; /; olddate;create (if necessary)
Obviously, this leaves out interesting things like setting up UDCs, directory structure, etc. The point of this note is to introduce the concept of using a 36Gb disk drive as a transfer media.
Bijo Kappen and Patrick Santucci both pointed out that TurboStore’s store-to-disk module is smart enough to create another “reel” when the 4Gb file limit is reached. From the TurboStore/iX documentation:
If STORE fills up the first disk file specified for the backup, it creates as many additional disk files as needed, or uses existing disk files. They will be built with the same default file characteristics as the first disk file. The naming convention used for additional files is to append the reel number to the end of the first disk filename. The resulting name will be an HFS-syntax name. For example, if STORE needed three disk files to store all files, they would be named:
/SYS/MYBACKUP/STORDISC
/SYS/MYBACKUP/STORDISC.2
/SYS/MYBACKUP/STORDISC.3
John Lee reported doing the very thing Stan suggested:
“This does work. We do it all the time here when moving information between systems.
“Another variation we’ve found useful is using large, inexpensive, disks for archive purposes. Instead of purchasing often expensive archival devices such as CD or optical jukeboxes, just throw the information on some cheap hard disks inside a cheap enclosure and hang it off your system. Users then have access to all this information online. It might not be right for everybody, but in many cases it is."