Charlie Brady wrote: >Tape backup (and maybe even a choice of packages) and PPTP inbound VPN >will definitely appear in a later beta. I have a dream, if I may: to be able to do a full backup of what's on the server wherever I want, without worrying about open files and such. Let me explain: I'm an OpenVMS guy, and under OpenVMS you can backup a system in a mode known as "standalone". The machine loads a reduced operating system that basically runs from memory, without locking up any file. This way you can make an image backup of any volume on whathever other volume the system can see. You can even do a backup of a system disk, restore it on another machine and boot it from the just restored disk. Under Unix, I miss something so effective... On other Unix systems, I resolved putting them in single user mode and do full dumps of each filesystem on a tape device. But the E-Smith system doesn't have any tape device... and in a sense it doesn't need any - I can do network dumps on the tape device on a remote Unix machine. But what about E-Smith? So I was wondering myself - suppose to define a new runlevel, say "runlevel B": in this runlevel, the machine behaves just like a single user mode with network support, open to logon for root/admin only and without any service running; this way, I guess that the system should have open for write few or no files at all... An interface to select directories/file systems and destination directory or local/remote tape unit, and then starts dump to do its work... What do you think about it? -- Pierluigi Miranda
