FORCESight Column – Feb 1994
Strategic Skills for 1994:
A Technical Support Top 10 List
By Stephen Force
Nineteen ninety-three was a year of transition for the Information Systems community. Uncertainty of what the dat processing future would be like was painfully prevalent. It was hard to get a feeling for which operating system and network environment to “bank on.”
CREATING A SANTA CRUZ OPERATIONS (SCO)
UNIX EMERGENCY SYSTEM
By Stephen Force
Having a current, well-tested operating system emergency system provides absolute piece of mind. If you have never had a damaged system you needed to get active immediately, you are either extremely lucky or new to the technical support business.
Not having an emergency system is a big mistake. Having an emergency system that you think is reliable, but fails when needed, will literately make a grown man cry. I know; I have been in the unfortunate position of having a emergency system fail due to a colleague’s “oversight.”
Because of this horrible experience, I will no longer trust anyone’s word if I personally have to rely on an operating system emergency system. I test it myself and will always have a trusted copy in my safe keeping.
This article deals with creating and testing such a emergency system, specifically for the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) UNIX system (SCO UNIX V Release 3.2 Version 4.2.). Although the concepts mentioned here apply to most operating system environments, this article is primarily targeted for the numerous SCO UNIX users among us.
The SCO UNIX emergency boot floppy diskette system allows you to recover your system in the event of a catastrophic system failure. Or, you could use these diskettes to restore a corrupted root filesystem without re-installing the operating system.
If you are the system administrator responsible for more than one SCO UNIX system, you should make emergency boot floppy diskette systems for each UNIX machine in your care. After creating a bootable operating system diskette, you should create a root file system floppy diskette that contains all operating system commands needed to either get your system running or to at least get you to the next step of data restoration if needed.
Prior to placing all of these newly created diskettes in safe storage, test each diskette on the proper computer. Do not assume anything. Test each diskette individually.
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Maintaining System and Data Availability on the Santa Cruz Operations (SCO) UNIX System
By Stephen Force
| Introduction Data availability in a Santa Cruz Operations (SCO) UNIX system is just as important as in any other major operating system environment. Information systems professionals who have performed data management duties in the mainframe environment can directly apply much of their training, knowledge and experience to UNIX. Much of the terminology is the same across operating systems. A full volume backup in SCO UNIX is the same as a full volume backup in MS-DOS, MVS, VM, Windows NT, etc. Incremental backups also compare favorably. This article briefly describes how to install, implement and use data backup and recovery utilities provided by Santa Cruz Operations (SCO) Open Desktop (ODT) Release 3.0 (which is SCO UNIX V Release 3.2 Version 4.2). Even though this article describes how data are backed up and restored on SCO ODT, it applies to all SCO UNIX systems because all commands are character-based and do not require X Windows to work. This article will explain data back up and restoration on the SCO UNIX system only. It will not cover all UNIX flavors, since they all differ in some way or.. |
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