Mondo Rescue

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Documentation

HTML manual [1.6x] and man page may be found here. Phazeman has written a HOWTO for newbies. For a more chatty, less formal FAQ, see the interview at #mandrake's website. For a tutorial written in Chinese, please see Fu-Shan's website. DVD users, please see Lachlan Cranswick's website.

BTW, to restore, just boot from the emergency floppy/CD and choose Nuke Mode to wipe and restore. If you prefer, boot to Interactive Mode for a less drastic, more user-friendly set of menus. Yes, it is that simple. :-)

Having problems?

Is your hardware supported? See Troff's page for info on supported hardware & related tests.

Is your Linux distribution supported? See below.

Are you running Mondo as a cron job? See KP's script for same.

Your kernel must support CD-ROM's, ISO9660, INITRD and ramdisks. It doesn't have to be stable (i.e. post-2.4.6) but it helps. If you are a Debian user and Mondo does not function properly on your system then your system is probably to blame but if you e-mail the Mondo mailing list then I'll try to help you anyway.

If you get the message, "Install isolinux first," then please install the syslinux RPM which may be found on this web page. If you have trouble installing or using Mondo, please attach to your e-mail to the mailing list a copy of the Mondo.err.tgz (or Mindi.err.tgz) output file.

Is your Linux distribution supported?

See the list below. Mondo works fine on Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE and other major Linux distributions. If it does not function properly on your distribution then it is probably because your distribution breaks various de facto or formal standards. Debian is a prime example of such a distribution. However, Mondo tries to work around the many eccentricities of the 100+ distributions out there. If you would like to work with me to overcome the eccentricities of your distribution, please e-mail your logfile to the mailing list. If you want me to support your distro and I don't already then please mail me a CD. It's more impressive than simply e-mailing me and saying, "Hey, support my distro please." :-)

I am in the process of testing Mondo on a variety of distributions. Your feedback would be appreciated, especially if you disagree with my assessment of Mondo's performance on a particular distro.

Linux Distribution

Mondo/Mindi versions tested

Backup experience

Restore experience

Caldera 2.4

?

?

?

Corel 1.0

?

?

?

Debian 2.2, 3.0

1.40 / 0.58

success has been reported

some problems

e-Smith/SME

1.40 / 0.58

Works well.

Restored OK.

Gentoo 1.x

1.43 / 0.63

See Mark's page

See Mark's page

Mandrake 8.x

1.6x / 0.8x

install afio and buffer first

no problems

Red Hat 6.2

1.17 / 0.43

install 2.2.19 kernel and afio

OK so far

Red Hat 7.3, 8.0

1..6x / 0.8x

install afio first

no problems

Slackware 8.0

1.07 / 0.33

works well

no problems

Storm 2000

?

?

?

SuSE

1.6x / 0.8x

works well

see Mike's page

TurboLinux 6.0.1

?

?

?

Caldera 2.4

Doesn't work. :-( I'll work on this when I have time.

Corel 1.0

No news yet.

Debian 3.0

Debian 3.0 has been problematic for me as a developer, more so than all other Linux distributions put together. This is unfortunate. The cause of the problem has not yet been determined. As I said to a Debian user last week, many people swear by Debian but they all appear to be users, not developers. In my role as a developer, I spend a lot of time swearing at Debian.

One user reports, "It appears that the 'testing' package of Lilo that I was running was missing boot.b files. I suppose there is an outside chance that the boot.b files weren't carried over from the last installation. Anyway, I've seen a bug report at packages.debian.org about the lilo package in question not including boot.b files that it normally should include. [...] Debian lilo package that came with the install CDs for Debian 3.0 r0 worked. Debian lilo "testing" package 22.2-3 had this missing boot.b file problem. Debian lilo package 22.3.3-2 worked fine."

Debian 2.2

Warning! Debian will sodomize your family pet if you give it the opportunity.

A successful Debian restore was performed with the 2.4 kernel (2.4.17-k6) by Randy Delfs on 2/28/2002.

Full backup/restore success has been reported by Mike Polniak. Randy Delfs has also reported success. Debian 2.2 r4 users must use the '-k FAILSAFE' switch to avoid using the non-standard Debian kernel.

e-Smith / SME5

I backed up and restored SME5. Thanks go to Gene Cooper for mailing me the SMS CD (and several others, all of which are proving very useful). SLES - an off-shoot of e-Smith [?] - was backed up and restored correctly by Herman Knief recently.

Gentoo 1.x

Mark Newman has put up a web page dedicated to helping Gentoo users use Mondo. It looks as if Mondo works OK on Gentoo but there are still some eccentricities to be ironed out. As soon as someone finds a full-featured Gentoo distro on CD (one which doesn't require me to stay online for 3 days downloading source code), I'll install Gentoo on a PC and hack some code. BTW, Pazzop points out that the lock-breaking patch to the Linux kernel can cause Mindi to freeze.

Mandrake 8.x

v1.4x works fine on Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2; install afio first, naturally.

"You might want to mention under under the Mandrake notes to run the programs with msec=2 or less. At levels 3,4,&5 issue.net gets replaced with issue.net.msec. Most server installs are going to run at msec=3 or higher." - Bill Dunlap

Red Hat 6.2

Red Hat 6.2 appears to be okay so far. Some users report that RH6.2 is missing some /dev entries. To fix that, type 'cd /dev; ./MAKEDEV fd0'. I haven't performed exhaustive testing, merely a partial backup and boot. Any volunteers?

Red Hat 7.x, 8.0

"Following my earlier troubles on RH7.3 BETA, I can now report that Mondo has just worked flawlessly on proper Red Hat 7.3 with a custom kernel 2.4.19-pre8-ac2! I performed a full archive and booted from CD#1 to do a 'compare', which passed without any apparent problems." - Alastair Stevens

Red Hat 7.0 worked fine. A user e-mailed me and let me know that he had backed up his system and it had restored OK.

Mondo v1.16 and Mindi v0.42 work just fine with the default Red Hat 7.1 kernel and tools. You must first install afio, of course.

Red Hat 7.2 works fine with Mondo v1.21 and Mindi v0.47. With them, I backed up, wiped and nuked my PC on Dec 4th.

Red Hat 7.3 works fine with Mondo v1.4x and Mindi v0.6x; ditto, 1.5x and 0.7x.

Red Hat 8.0 works fine with Mondo v1.6x and Mindi v0.6x.

Slackware 8.0

"I am using Slackware8/kernel 2.4.6/reiserfs and was able to do a complete backup and restore using mondo-1.07/mindi-0.33. After starting mondo-archive i got a friendly msg that my Slackware needed afio and lilo.conf. (i use grub) before it could continue.

After a quick install of afio and editing my /etc/lilo.conf, i reran mondo-archive and all went well, it burned my backup CD and after rebooting the CD i was back up and running Slackware 8 . Works great!"

Mike Polniak <mikpolniak at adelphia dot net>

Interesting note, Newt won't build without the file: /usr/include/popt.h which is part of the RPM package. It's not something that you would normally install on a minimal Slackware system, but it was needed. That might save someone some hunting in the future.

- Andy Glass

 

Storm 2000

No news yet.

SuSE

NEW - check out Mike's page for SuSE users! It's groovy.

SuSE 7.2 and 7.3 have been backed up using Mondo v1.2x; success was reported at backup-time and restore-time. If you have trouble with SuSE 7.3 and Mondo then you're not the only one. A lot of people do. There is a bug in SuSE's newt and slang libraries.

"I finally got my SuSE 8.0 installed this weekend, and decided to see how Mondo works. I used the rpms from the CD's for Newt and Slang. I got isolinux from rpmfind.net and compiled it on my old 7.3 box. [KP's RPM is now on the Download page, btw. -HR] I used Jesse's mondo 1.42-4 and Mindi 0.62-4. Installation was OK, and Mondo ran with no problems at all." - Mike

TurboLinux 6.0.1

No news yet.