[Info-vax] NFS proxy database when booted from DVD?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-01-31 20:09:41 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:

> ...I'm contemplating what it would take to restore one of these 
> backups, such as to a brand new system with empty disk drives after the 
> old system went up in smoke...

Boot OpenVMS off a customized USB or customized DVD—based off the 
standard installation kit, with an added procedure and maybe with an 
added menu item—and have that procedure use sftp to retrieve and stage 
the savesets for restoration.

Depending on how locked down the configuration is, the procedure could 
perform the saveset restoration.

If you want to get more complex with the access credentials needed for 
the backup server, have the procedure generate a key-pair and then 
display the generated public key, and transfer that to the target 
server during the recovery when the restoration is necessary.

Remember to provide a way to clobber the client known hosts entry, if 
the backup server sshd identity might change.

NFS support on OpenVMS has tended to be somewhat less than robust.

If you want to use NFS and if you can't pre-populate the files for 
read-only access, then you might have to figure out how to mount an LD 
partition or similar using a memory-only section or paged or non-paged 
pool or some such; an emulated disk device in memory sans backing 
storage.  That's probably possible using a memory-resident section, but 
I don't know that LD has support for that sort of a volatile device.  
Generate and place anything that needs to be read-write on that pseudo 
disk device, and aim some logical names at the files.  The ancient 
sys$update:VMBUVAX1.COM and PDDRIVER.EXE had some embedded shenanigans 
around pseudo devices, IIRC.  I might be misremembering this, but 
VMBUVAX1.COM or some other tool from that era had the source code to a 
simple pseudo driver embedded in the DCL procedure.

But I wouldn't use NFS here.


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