Solaris 10 SSH Migration

While migrating data between multiple servers I ran into a few interesting situations with SSH that I thought would be worth mentioning. If nothing else it will add some more documentation to this site.

Solaris tar vs. GNU tar

After using tar for years on Linux I always figured all tar's were the same until I tried to untar an archive on Solaris. When I untar'ed a Linux tar archive on Solaris I ran into an error along with a @LongLink file in my directory. This was caused by incompatabilities between GNU tar and the default tar bundled in Solaris. Luckily, Sun thought of that and includes GNU tar with Solaris.

Here is a quick way to transfer file systems between two servers. In order to do this properly you may want to temporarily enable root in your sshd_config. Just thought it was handy :)

/usr/sfw/bin/gtar cf - ./dir1 | ssh root@fs0 "(cd /export/Corporate && /usr/sfw/bin/gtar xvpf -)"

Post your comments...

  • Agata

    Posted at 2010-07-15 13:34:06

    thanks, I had always trouble transferring large dynamic sites from 1 server to another

    Reply to comment

  • Ben Audet

    Posted at 2010-05-18 14:51:58

    On the source host, where you are executing the "tar" command, you should as well make sure you are running the GNU tar command, i.e.: /usr/sfw/bin/gtar . Thanks for sharing! :-)

    Reply to comment

  • foo

    Posted at 2008-12-23 10:12:44

    Why not SUNWgtar? => /usr/sfw/bin/gtar

    Reply to comment