SUMMARY: JumpstartWebflash Images :

A belated thanks to Iain Millar, Daniel Nuqo and Dan O'Callaghan who
kindly enlightend me to use the -S switch which doesn't spend time
processing the flar archive size, along with some very useful
information. I was also told that when recovering the flash images,
the jumpstart server decompresses the image into swap/memory.

I managed to reduce the time from 2hr, 34mins -> 1hrs 35m just by
using the -S switch., That was 30 minutes faster than using a
traditonal dds4 tapedrive on scsi3.

Interestingly, the time it took to archive the 22Gb flash archive over
1Gb network directly to the sagita san from the client over nfs was
exactly the same time writing to the JBOD raid 5 disk over Gbit NFS
which was attached at the jumpstart server. (i'd be interested to hear
you comments). Possibly a limiting factor of NFS?

Also, thanks to those of you, including Scott Cooper, who helped out
with getting me sorted with my original flasharchive/jumpstart server
and solaris2.6 questions.

You know who you are, thanks!!!

regards

dan.

My original post below with Dan's reply.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan O'Callaghan
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:05:34 +0000
Subject: Re: Jumpstart webflash image resore times.
To: Dan Cave <dan.cave@gmail.com>


Dan
You can save time with flarcreate by using the "-S" switch, stops it
calculating the size.

I've never had flarcreate accurately calculate the image anyway, i think
(could be very wrong here) but for this to work properly you need as
much swap space as the size of the flar.
The boxes i create are usually about 2-3gig in size and when i create
the initial image, the swap is usually around 500M. I've noticed that is
spends about an hour trying to calculate the size of the flar and then
gives up and creates the image as if i had uses the "-S" switch.
When you restore the image, i always have the message "no size
information of the flar archive". I'm using Solaris 8 2/04.
One day i'll add a temp swap file to see if i'm right.

On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 15:54 +0000, Dan Cave wrote:
> Hi all.,
>
> Previous to my last two emails, I thought I'd update you and ask for a
> bit of feedback.
>
> My orginal email asked if anyone knew whether it was possible to
> backup and restore solaris2.6 images created via flarcreate and
> restored via a jumpstart webflash archive on a solaris 8 box.
>
> Well, I successfully managed to build a jumpstart server (sol8) with
> flash image capability, recover the images after using Gbit ethernet
> point to point, and copying the flarcreate script to the 2.6 box,
> creating a 26Gb flar image(via a local nfs mount), which we usually
> store on a dds3/4 tape using ufsdump/ufsrestore.
>
> However, our usual tape resore takes just over two hours from a home
> rolled restore cd from which we boot.
>
> The restored flar image from jumpstart takes over two hours also,
> however I would have expected it to be quicker as I'm using Gbit
> ethernet.
>
> Has anyone had any experiences with restores from flar images which
> take roughtly the same ammount of time from tape? I've been
> enlightened that you cannot use compressed flash archives as they are
> purely for storage purposes.
>
> I was really looking to save time when creating and  restoring flar
> (FRU's as sun call them) images using jumpstart, but I'm a little
> bemused as to why this is so.... I had applied the 2Gb patch for
> restoring flar images and have a working system from which I created
> my 26Gb image. (a mix of OS data, applications and user data)
>
> It takes 2hrs 43 minutes to work out and create my flar image over a
> Gbit net, as I also believe that roughly 40% of this time is spent
> working out how large the image is going to be. Some editing of the
> script and adding in timing debug which I added in and created a flar
> archive of my jumpstart server to work this out.
>
> Has anyone else experienced similar behaviour?
>
> Feedback is most definitely appreciated. I shall summarise..
>
> Regards
>
> dan.
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