Relax and Recover

Testing the rescue solution Relax and Recover, ReaR.

The test environment has 2 machines: one is the master, rear01, and also export the a NFS share so the second machine, rear02, can use to save the backup files.

Adding a disk

The NFS export is a disk added via Vagrant configuration.

It seems that the order of definitions is import, and the order is:

1. Add the disk

2. Create a new controller to don't interfere with the disk created by Vagrant when starting the VM.

3. Attach the disk to the controller.

First we create a file that will represent the disk, a VDI file. But create the file only once

file_to_disk = File.realpath(".").to_s + "/rear01b.vdi"
if !File.exist?(file_to_disk)
    vb.customize [
        'createhd',
        '--filename', file_to_disk,
        '--format', 'VDI',
        '--size', 15 * 1024 # 15GB
    ]

Then we create a new controller for the disk

vb.customize [
    'storagectl', :id,
    '--name', 'rearctl',
    '--add', 'sata'
]

Finally we add the disk to the controller

vb.customize [
    'storageattach', :id,
    '--storagectl', 'rearctl',
    '--port', 0,
    '--type', 'hdd', '--medium',
    file_to_disk
]

NFS share

After adding the disk, we configure it to be exported via NFS from rear01. This area will be used to store the backup files created by ReaR running on rear02.

We start creating the partition on the disk and configuring the NFS server on rear01

rear01.vm.provision "shell", inline: $parted_sdb
rear01.vm.provision "shell", inline: "mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 > /dev/null 2>&1"
rear01.vm.provision "shell", inline: $nfs_server

Where $parted_sdb creates the partition on the disk

    $parted_sdb = <<-SCRIPT
    parted --script /dev/sdb \
    unit % \
    mklabel msdos \
    mkpart primary ext3 1 100% \
    quit
    SCRIPT

And $nfs_server configure the NFS server

    $nfs_server = <<-SCRIPT
    # Create directory before exporting it.
    if [ ! -d /data/ ]; then
        echo "Creating directory '/data'"
        mkdir /data/
    fi
    mount /dev/sdb1 /data
    # Install NFS package
    yum -y --quiet install nfs-utils
    systemctl enable nfs-server.service
    systemctl start nfs-server.service
    echo "/data   192.168.50.11(rw,sync,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check)" > /etc/exports
    /usr/sbin/exportfs -a
    SCRIPT

NFS client and ReaR

The NFS client is configured and the ReaR package is installed on rear02

rear02.vm.provision "shell", inline: $nfs_client
rear02.vm.provision "shell", inline: "yum -y --quiet install rear"

Where $nfs_client is define as

    $nfs_client = <<-SCRIPT
    # Install NFS package
    yum -y --quiet install nfs-utils
    # Create mount point for the NFS export.
    if [ ! -d /backup/ ]; then
        echo "Creating directory '/backup'"
        mkdir /backup/
    fi
    # Check if fstab already configured.
    grep 'backup' /etc/fstab > /dev/null 2>&1
    if [ "$?" -eq 1 ]; then
        echo "192.168.50.10:/data  /backup   nfs rw,sync,hard,intr  0     0" >> /etc/fstab
    fi
    mount /backup
    SCRIPT

Now the cluster is ready to be a test environment for ReaR.