Mondo for Debian
================

This text contains hints, workarounds and explanations for using mondo on a
Debian system.

Location of files mondorescue.iso, MA.log.gz & changed.files
------------------------------------------------------------

The above files are all located in /var/cache/mindi irrespective of what 
the upstream documentation may say. 


Location of file mondorestore.log
---------------------------------

The above file is located in /var/log irrespective of what the upstream 
documentation may say.


Kernel Panic when booting restore media with 2.6.18 kernel
----------------------------------------------------------

There may be a kernel panic when booting a restore media containing a 
stock 2.8.18 Debian kernel.

The workaround is to remove 'acpi=off' from the 'ADDITIONAL_BOOT_PARAMS' 
variable defined at the beginning of /usr/sbin/mindi.

This may only affect users with certain VIA chipsets. Please see Debian 
bug #389931 for more details.

Note: You will have to boot into the rescue media to verify you are not 
affected by this. QEMU or VMware do not expose the problem!


NTFS Windows Installations not bootable after restore
-----------------------------------------------------

After a restore, NTFS Windows installations may not be bootable. Rather an
error message "A disk read error occurred. Press Xtrl+Alt+Del to restart." is
displayed.

A fix for this is to use gparted (and possibly gtparted but no other
partitioning tool) resize the NTFS filesystem to that it fills the entire
partition it lives in. The error appears to only happen for NTFS filesystems
that are smaller than the partition they live in.


Boot Images in /root/images
---------------------------

MondoRescue does not currently allow for influencing where the boot images it
creates are stored. They will always end up under /root/images. This can be a
problem on installations where the partition that holds /root is small.

A workaround is to create a symbolic link to a different location with more
space. Example:

/root/images -> /home/mondorescue/images


CD Streaming
------------

The CD streaming feature of mondoarchive (option '-C') is EXPERIMENTAL which
is what the manpage states. In fact, it appears to be rather broken. Some of
the issues are fixed in this package: selecting the burn speed should work,
it won't segfault during a mondoarchvie run. However, restoring from multiple
CDs still doesn't seem to work but hangs towards the end of the first CD.

If you want to experiment with this feature, it might help to keep the
following in mind:

- Use blank CDs only. If you use CDRWs (which is recommended for
  environmentally and monetarian reasons by the author of this text) make sure
  they are blank when throwing them at mondoarchive in streaming mode.
- Don't make mistakes when feeding media to mondoarchive in streaming mode. It
  will choke and the backup will have to be restarted.

Having said that, streaming is certainly a useful feature. I'll work on it as
time permits. If your time does permit, I am receptive to patches (and so is
upstream).


Image Archiving: (V)FAT versus NTFS
-----------------------------------

If you have a (V)FAT partition please mount it to get it backed up by
mondoarchive and restored by mondo. Using the '-x' option will not work.

For NTFS, '-x' is the way to go.


"Too many open files" in log
----------------------------

You may get entries in the log similar to this one:

getfacl: /home/andree/shed/kernel/kernel-source-2.4.26/include/config/paride/pf: Too many open files

If you do, increase the number of allowed open file descriptors for the user
session. The default value for open file descriptors in Debian is 1024. To
increase this value, if you run bash (and potentially other shells), use
'ulimit -n 2048' to double this.


Using the File-Browser for Partial Restore
------------------------------------------

When using mondorestore to selectively restore files, the 'Editing filelist'
window will only list a limited, hardcoded number of files. This number is
defined by define 'ARBITRARY_MAXIMUM' in include 'my-stuff.h'. This value is
currently set to 500 in the upstream source and has been increased to 2000 for
the Debian package. Changing this value requires a recompile of the package.

A workaround for this shortcoming is to restore a complete directory tree to a
temporary location, delete all unwanted files and directories, and move the
remainder to its final destination.


Using floppy disks as rescue media
----------------------------------

mondoarchive will offer to write a set of rescue floppies (unless the '-F'
switch is used). These floppy disks will only work with the FAILSAFE kernel. The
reason is that stock Debian kernels don't have the floppy driver built into the
kernel and that the kernel is too large for one floppy with an initrd and a
kernel image. Because of the space issue, mondoarchiv (or rather mindi) creates
a root/boot floppy set. Because the stock kernel does not have floppy support
compiled in a kernel panic results when trying to acces the second (the root)
floppy.

Also, building the boot/root floppy images requires that lilo is installed on
the system. This does not mean that it actually needs to be used to boot the
system, only that the package is installed. (Because most people won't need the
boot/root floppies, the mindi package only suggests the lilo package.)

Finally a word of caution: Floppy disks are notoriously unreliable. Dont't use
them unless you really really have to. (A CD writer costs the same as a few
boxes of floppy disks these days.)

 -- Andree Leidenfrost <andree@debian.org>  Sat, 15 Sep 2007 21:45:37 +1000
