On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Alan Pearson<alandpear...@yahoo.com> wrote: > You have to appreciate a lot of people have AMANDA in production > environments and it is working. We are very reluctant to change it in case > it breaks, we don't want the overhead of having to fix it.
Absolutely -- I hope I did not imply that everyone, or even most people, should be running snapshots! But hopefully at least a few people can spare some resources to test things out and alert us to any problems. > I am especially nervous to change since AMANDA has changed so much (read - > the change to PERL) and is no longer a straight upgrade with bugfixes and > new features We're working double-time to ensure backward compatibility, and any failing on that point is a bug. But certainly backups are often a set-it-and-forget-it kind of technology, and frequent upgrades can be disruptive, even if they are smooth. > I personally think this is a failing of the AMANDA team to realise this, > and to see that a lot of sys admins are reluctant to upgrade for these > reasons. I realize that Amanda is working great *right now* for a number of people, but if the project is to remain relevant, it must serve the needs of today's new installations, while remaining fully compatibile with existing installations. That's a lot to ask, and it's not easy. I think we deserve some credit for our success so far, and some support for our continued committment to backward compatibility. Which brings me back to the original topic: any and all assistance with testing recent versions of Amanda in different situations is extraordinarily helpful to ensuring backward compatibility. For example, Alan, it would be great to hear from you that the Kerberos authentication continues to function in the latest snapshots, particularly since it is not something to which we can apply unit tests (we have almost 2000 unit tests at this point, by the way). That only has to mean setting up Amanda on a throwaway machine or VM, running amservice to verify the authentication, and dropping a note to amanda-users@amanda.org with the results. The snapshots are here: http://www.zmanda.com/community-builds.php and to be clear: please do *not* run snapshots in production! Dustin -- Open Source Storage Engineer http://www.zmanda.com