mksysb’s can come in handy for various situations. Whether you’re doing an upgrade, or just wanting a backup of a system, I definitely recommend using the mksysb command.
Creating a mksysb is a very simple process. First you need to make sure you have enough space free to dump it to, then just kick it off.

I generally run something like:

"mksysb -iep /mksysb_dump.mksysb

I generally create an NFS share from the NIM server, and mount it up on each AIX client in order to dump a weekly mksysb. The overall process actually ssh’s to the remote AIX client, mounts the NFS share, dumps a mksysb, compresses, umount, done.

With having issues in the past using the software compression within the mksysb process, I generally use the -p flag to disable software compression, and gzip at a later time. With a very busy rootvg, you will probably most likely have to disable compression, as you will likely run into issues restoring it.
Have fun.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 and is filed under AIX 5.3, AIX 6.1, Various HOWTOs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.