Johannes Meixner

Introducing Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) for the novice users. What is it and what can it mean for you? Is Disaster Recovery useful to consider it or not? How can ReaR assist you with DR? ReaR can store the details about your systems on disks (NAS, USB, SAN,...) or network (PXE, NFS, CIFS,...) including the complete backup. It also creates a bootable image which you need to recreate your system from scratch. Furthermore, thanks to the modular concept, ReaR integrates perfectly with external backup solutions (be commercial and/or open source ones) to do the backup and restore part which makes ReaR very scalable in big enterprises. ReaR scales even with Cloud solutions and is the heart of another great project (DRLM or Disaster Recovery Linux Manager).

Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) is the de facto standard generic (bare metal) disaster recovery framework for all kind of Linux systems. ReaR is in common use by admins for disaster recovery on thousands and thousands of Linux server systems. The first part of the "ReaR Basics" talk will be presented by Gratien D'haese (one of the co-founders of ReaR).

In the second part of the talk Johannes Meixner (one of the main developers of ReaR) will use his own laptop to demonstrate the ReaR disaster recovery framework. Therefore, Johannes will show a real live demo without safety net how ReaR is used to recover his own laptop from soft errors like deleted essential files (rm -r /lib...) and/or destroyed partitioning/bootloader (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX). Come and see for yourself how ReaR can save your day!

Other people: Gratien D'haese

An informal talk with ReaR, DRLM, and Bareos users about what they would like to get implemented in future ReaR, DRLM, and Bareos versions.

This talk happens at the end of the "Backup and Disaster Recovery" devroom time schedule. This way also new ReaR, DRLM, and Bareos users could first get informed about ReaR, DRLM, and Bareos so that afterwards they could better tell about what enhancements or features they would like to have implemented in future versions.

Other people: Gratien D'haese Didac Oliveira Jörg Steffens Stephan Dühr

To get some initial basic understanding how Relax-and-Recover works you will use it yourself on two virtual machines on your laptop.

On the first virtual machine Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) will be installed and used to prepare that machine for disaster recovery.

The second virtual machine is the replacement machine that is used for disaster recovery of the first virtual machine.

Preconditions for this workshop:

To actively participate you need a sufficiently powerful laptop it that is ready-to-use prepared as follows:

• An NFS server runs on the laptop that exports a directory in "rw" mode.

• Two simple virtual machines are running on the laptop:

  • x86/x86_64 with BIOS (no UEFI)
  • hardware virtualization (no paravirtualization)
  • a single virtual 20GB harddisk (IDE disk)
  • a usual virtual CDROM drive (IDE CDROM)
  • a single usual virtual network interface card (no special driver/firmware)

• A small and simple Linux system is running on the first virtual machine that is installed in a single ext3/ext4 filesystem with GRUB/GRUB2 as bootloader.

• The Linux system running on the first virtual machine can access the NFS server that runs directly on the laptop.

• A second "empty" virtual machine without an operating system that is identical as the first one (BIOS, same 20GB harddisk, CDROM, same NIC).

• Preferably a recent ReaR version is installed on the Linux system that is running on the first virtual machine

What will be done step by step:

If not already done Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) will be installed on the Linux system that is running on the first virtual machine.

ReaR will be set up (configured) for disaster recovery.

By running "rear mkbackup" on the first virtual machine one gets on the NFS server a backup.tar.gz and a rear-hostname.iso.

The first virtual machine is shut down to simulate a disaster happened.

The second virtual machine is booted from the rear-hostname.iso via CDROM.

Now the special ReaR rescue/recovery system runs on the second virtual machine and by running "rear recover" therein one gets on the second virtual machine the system re-created as it had been before on the first virtual machine.

An initial basic and generic introduction for beginners on Disaster Recovery with Relax-and-Recover.

This basic introduction on Disaster Recovery with Relax-and-Recover will explain the following items from a generic higher-level point of view:

• What does disaster recovery mean ?
• How does disaster recovery work ?
• What disaster recovery is not meant to do
• What is Relax-and-Recover ?
• How does Relax-and-Recover work ?
• How to set up Relax-and-Recover
• Relax-and-Recover advantages/disadvantages
• Relax-and-Recover limitations