[Fed-Talk] Server restore woes
[Fed-Talk] Server restore woes
- Subject: [Fed-Talk] Server restore woes
- From: David Emery <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:30:53 -0400
I've been having a lot of problems (HW and SW) with my G5 that's running
Leopard Server. I thought I'd share my experiences to date.
The biggest surprise in all this so far has been that you cannot create
a disk image of a single drive (in Disk Utility) and then use that to
restore the contents to a RAID set. (In fact I crashed Disk Utility at
one point trying to do this.)
The guy at the Apple store basically said "strip to Apple components
only, re-install the OS and then add stuff."
So that's what I've been doing.
1. removed all the 3rd-party RAM, all the cards, was able to
reinstall OS X client on a single drive.
2. added eSATA card, reloaded drivers, was able to mount the eSATA
drives.
3. tried to restore OS X Server from my backups, did not work.
4. tried to reload OS X Server from install disks, it said "not
enough RAM"
5. added back my 2gb of OWC RAM (machine has 512mb of Apple RAM)
6. Then did a clean install of OS X Server onto the internal drive.
7. That booted, so I rebooted back to the Client install, and then
did a disk synk to restore OS X server settings, applications, prefs,
etc. That was a risk, but it worked.
8. Backed up the server partition (using "create image of disk
drive" from Disk Utility)
9. Then I wanted to RAID the 2 drives on the Apple motherboard
SATA controller. Unfortunately, the restore-from-image -FAILED-, but
it did warn me. You cannot 'image' a single drive and then restore
that image to a RAID set using Disk Utilities. (That was a very
unpleasant surprise!)
10. Instead, I used synk again to restore the OS X Server to the
RAID drive. This time (unlike step 3), it worked.
Now I'm re-imaging the OS X Server drive, and when that's done (it
takes a long time), I'll restore more files to both the internal drive
(RAID Mirrored, will hold OS X Server and home directories) and the
eSATA external drive (will be set up RAID Mirrored, and will hold
photos, household data and other stuff for retention.)
The cause of the problems were hardware glitches. At first I thought
they were RAM-related, but now I'm suspecting the internal SATA card I
had in the machine (along with 2 extra drives.) I've removed that card
and the 2 drives, and placed the drives in an external enclosure. I
still think I'll replace this big G5 with a nice small Mini at some
point, although it will be a shame to give up the eSATA card and
eSATA-only disk enclosure. The hint that future Minis might support
eSATA definitely got my attention, that would be Very Nice!
One other point: When I did that clean install of Leopard Server (step
4), I did the usual 'install from DVD, then run Software Update'. After
I did that, I noticed a "Server Settings" app in the Dock, and that
aligns with the server first-run questions I got when I rebooted. This
makes me wonder if Apple is preparing a 'Server Lite', which is somethig
I have long advocated for SOHO use like mine. In particular, 'server
lite' did not prompt me to configure DNS, but it also didn't appear to
support LDAP or mobile accounts. That's a mistake in my view; the
primary justification I used (to myself :-) for OS X Server was LDAP and
network accounts. Now that they're working OK (but not great), I'm a
big fan of mobile accounts.
However, given the problems I've had with OS X Server (both with these
hardware issues on the G5 and the general problems configuring it), I
think I should have compromised and just bought a big FW800 disk
enclosure to hang off of one machine and set it up for Time Machine
backups across the network. I'm also running Tiger Server to handle
external facing websites on another (G4/933) machine, that setup has
given me -no problems- (except for the time when one channel in an extra
IDE controller card went and took out 1 drive of a RAID set, but RAID
saved my body parts there!)
dave
--
David Emery, DSCI, supporting PdM FCS (BCT) SW Integration
703 298 3473 (office/cell), 703 272 7496 (fax)
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