the general problem is wanting to back up a bunch of win2k machines with amanda.
the best solution would be if i could tell amanda to backup: //win2k-machine/C$/directory1 //win2k-machine/C$/directory2 ... //win2k-machine/C$/directoryN the C$ shares already exist, so the administrative overhead for the client machines is very minimal. it appears that amanda can't do this. i'm guessing amanda just calls smbclient (i haven't started looking through the source, so i'm not sure), and smbclient wants to connect to a real share (and not a subdirectory of one), so i'm stuck on this point. one of the options i see is to hack the amanda source so that it can use smbclient to connect to a share, and then work within smbclient (somehow) to grab things within that share, but that seems difficult. also, this post (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amanda-users/message/31162) contains quoted text that suggests that doing this won't work. i can't find the actual post that was quoted from, because yahoo groups's threading is fairly effectively broken. so if there is a way to access subdirectories of samba shares, that would be ideal. a slightly less-good solution would be to have all the client machines share things they want backed-up explicitly. so if the machine HOMER wants to share c:\donuts and c:\porkchops, it makes shares backup-donuts and backup-porkchops. now what would be great is if amanda could back-up backup-* on each client it knows about. the amanda docs in SAMBA suggest that this should be possible: "May be asterisk (*) to match all remaining shares for this Samba server. The first match in the file is used, so specific entries must be listed first." if amanda can only get "remaining shares", this solution might not really work either, because i'd have to enumerate all regular shares and ignore them, and then backup //HOMER/*. but ideally, i'd like to do //homer/backup-* and have amanda know what i'm talking about. when i try this, it doesn't work. amcheck and amdump both throw back the messages that smbclient gives when you try to tell smbclient to connecto to //machine/* -- namely, that this share does not exist. (and incidentally, my amanda setup works fine for explicitly-named samba shares, so i'm pretty sure this * thing is the problem). since these two avenues have failed, the solution i'm looking at implementing involves explicitly sharing dirctories on the client that need to be backed up, and *also* maintaining this list on the amanda server's disklist file (probably through a cgi or whatever). this solution has sort of a lot of overhead. so is there a better way of doing what i'm trying to do? or is this labor-intensive path i'm starting to walk pretty much the only way? please cc me on any replies, as i'm not subscribed to this list. also, i'm still hoping for a reply on my question "better authentication than .amandahosts?" (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amanda-users/message/32244?threaded=1). fortunately, it's easier to hack around these kinds of problems on the UNIX side than on the windows side. thanks, tyler -- "It's Redhat 7. You don't even *need* the root password." --tyler
