Incremenats as big as full

[Anthony Worrall]

Hi

This is not realy an amanda problem but I thought one of you may have seen this 
problems before.

We have a filesytem which contians files that are basically static. However
when they are backed up the incrementals are almost as big as the full backups.

server> amadmin sir-1 info advisor1 /advisor/video

Current info for advisor1 /advisor/video:
  Stats: dump rates (kps), Full:  2270.0, 2231.0, 2274.0
Incremental:  2119.0, 2250.0, 2275.0
  compressed size, Full:  62.1%, 62.1%, 62.1%
Incremental:  66.6%, 66.6%, 66.6%
  Dumps: lev datestmp  tape file   origK   compK secs
  0  20030618  sir-1-20   54 10650330 6617775 2915
  1  20030703  sir-1-107  9873700 6578667 3104

This happens with dump and gntar backups. If I do a find on the filesystem it 
claims that no files have been modified in the last 90 days.

advisor1:/tmp/amanda # find /advisor/video/* -type f -mtime -90 -ls

advisor1:/tmp/amanda # dump --version
dump: invalid option -- -
dump 0.4b26 (using libext2fs 1.26 of 3-Feb-2002)
usage:  dump [-0123456789acMnqSu] [-B records] [-b blocksize] [-d density]
 [-e inode#,inode#,...] [-E file] [-f file] [-h level]
 [-I nr errors] [-j zlevel] [-s feet] [-T date] [-z zlevel] 
filesystem
dump [-W | -w]

advisor1:/tmp/amanda # tar --version
tar (GNU tar) 1.13.18
Copyright 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This program comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
You may redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License;
see the file named COPYING for details.
Written by John Gilmore and Jay Fenlason.

advisor1:/tmp/amanda # cat /etc/SuSE-release
SuSE Linux 8.0 (i386)
VERSION = 8.0

advisor1:/tmp/amanda # uname -a
Linux advisor1 2.4.20 #1 SMP Fri Jan 10 15:32:51 GMT 2003 i686 unknown

advisor1:/tmp/amanda # df -h /advisor/video/
FilesystemSize  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2  17G   11G  6.0G  63% /advisor/video

advisor1:/tmp/amanda # mount -v | grep /advisor/video
/dev/sda2 on /advisor/video type ext3 (rw)


Anthony Worrall
School IT Networking Coordinator
School of Systems Engineering
The University of Reading,
Whiteknights, PO Box 225
Reading,
Berkshire, UK
RG6 6AY
Tel:   +44 (0)118 931 8610
Fax:   +44 (0)118 975 1822
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: Incremenats as big as full

[Paul Bijnens]

Anthony Worrall wrote:
We have a filesytem which contians files that are basically static. However
when they are backed up the incrementals are almost as big as the full backups.
...
This happens with dump and gntar backups. If I do a find on the filesystem it 
claims that no files have been modified in the last 90 days.

advisor1:/tmp/amanda # find /advisor/video/* -type f -mtime -90 -ls
Check also the ctime  (i-node change time):

find /advisor/video/* -type f -ctime -90

--
Paul Bijnens, XplanationTel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUMFax  +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/  email:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
***
* I think I've got the hang of it now:  exit, ^D, ^C, ^\, ^Z, ^Q, F6, *
* quit,  ZZ, :q, :q!,  M-Z, ^X^C,  logoff, logout, close, bye,  /bye, *
* stop, end, F3, ~., ^]c, +++ ATH, disconnect, halt,  abort,  hangup, *
* PF4, F20, ^X^X, :D::D, KJOB, F14-f-e, F8-e,  kill -1 $$,  shutdown, *
* kill -9 1,  Alt-F4,  Ctrl-Alt-Del,  AltGr-NumLock,  Stop-A,  ...*
* ...  "Are you sure?"  ...   YES   ...   Phew ...   I'm out  *
***

Re: Incremenats as big as full

[Anthony Worrall]

Hi

Paul hit the nail on the head.

It seem the administrator of that machine was running a find over the 
directories which updated the ctime of all the files.

Thanks Paul.


Anthony

- Begin Forwarded Message -


Anthony Worrall wrote:
> We have a filesytem which contians files that are basically static. However
> when they are backed up the incrementals are almost as big as the full 
backups.
...
> This happens with dump and gntar backups. If I do a find on the filesystem it 
> claims that no files have been modified in the last 90 days.
> 
> advisor1:/tmp/amanda # find /advisor/video/* -type f -mtime -90 -ls

Check also the ctime  (i-node change time):

find /advisor/video/* -type f -ctime -90


-- 
Paul Bijnens, XplanationTel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUMFax  +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/  email:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
***
* I think I've got the hang of it now:  exit, ^D, ^C, ^\, ^Z, ^Q, F6, *
* quit,  ZZ, :q, :q!,  M-Z, ^X^C,  logoff, logout, close, bye,  /bye, *
* stop, end, F3, ~., ^]c, +++ ATH, disconnect, halt,  abort,  hangup, *
* PF4, F20, ^X^X, :D::D, KJOB, F14-f-e, F8-e,  kill -1 $$,  shutdown, *
* kill -9 1,  Alt-F4,  Ctrl-Alt-Del,  AltGr-NumLock,  Stop-A,  ...*
* ...  "Are you sure?"  ...   YES   ...   Phew ...   I'm out  *
***



- End Forwarded Message -


Anthony Worrall
School IT Networking Coordinator
School of Systems Engineering
The University of Reading,
Whiteknights, PO Box 225
Reading,
Berkshire, UK
RG6 6AY
Tel:   +44 (0)118 931 8610
Fax:   +44 (0)118 975 1822
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

missing backup data

[James Williamson]

Hi All,

We've got Amanda set up to backup to a Onstream tape driver (SC-30),
when we run amdump it reports that it's successully backed up the contents
of the disklist.
However, when it comes to try and restore something on the disklist using
amrecover it reports this error:

EOF, check amidxtapid.debug file on backup.
amrecover: short block 0 bytes
UNKNOWN file
amrecover: Can't read file header

I've gone through the docs and a likely cause seems to be the wrong tape's
in the drive and / or the tape needs rewinding. I've tried both these
without
any joy. In fact, I've got the dumpcycle set to 0 and the number of
tapecycle
set to 1. I'm under the impression that with this configuration Amanda will
dump everything in my disklist daily. I've gone through the docs and tried
this to see what's on the disk:

amrestore -p /dev/nosst0 no-such-host > /dev/null

which returns this:

amrestore:0: skipping start of tape: date 20030703 label nameon1
amrestore:1: skipping ..backup file1...

Yet if I run it again I get this:

amrestore: WARNING: not at start of tape file numbers will be offset
amrestore:1: skipping ..backup file2...

and so on.

I'm assuming that amrestore invoked in this manner will iterate through each
file without having to be manually restarted. Does this mean when I use
amrecover
I must wind the tape to the correct place? Please excuse me if my knowledge
of tape driver is woefully inadequate.

I would appreciate anyone's help/thoughts.

Regards,

James Williamson
Name On The Net Ltd
www.nameonthe.net
+44 208 7415453

how to set /etc/localtime Redhat ES 2.1 (7.2)

[Michael Martinez]

Hopefully this isn't off topic. one of the reasons I'm looking for the
answer to this is so my tape backup clients and servers use the same
time.

I've got a redhat ES 2.1 system. how do I set the /etc/localtime? I want
to change it from GMT to Eastern Standard.

I made the change in /etc/sysconfig/clock, but this did not effect the
change in localtime.

Thanks - 
-- 
Michael Martinez
Linux System Administrator
CSREES/ISTM/USDA
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

problems with amlabel/amcheck

[Mikkel Gadegaard]

I had amanda up and 
running only to discover that the machine acting as host didn't have enough HD 
capacity to run Amanda smoothly. The project layed low for several weeks until I 
got hold of a new and bigger machine.
 
Installed RedHat 9.0 
on it and installed amanda and mtx
 
started configuring 
everything as I remember doing it the last time, but now I've run into 
problems (So I obviously couldn't remember it :-)
 
a mtx -f /dev/sg2 
status gives me the following:
# mtx -f /dev/sg2 
status  Storage Changer /dev/sg2:1 Drives, 19 Slots ( 0 Import/Export 
)Data Transfer Element 0:Empty  Storage 
Element 1:Full :VolumeTag=01L1  Storage 
Element 2:Full :VolumeTag=02L1  Storage 
Element 3:Full :VolumeTag=03L1  Storage 
Element 4:Full :VolumeTag=04L1  Storage 
Element 5:Full :VolumeTag=05L1  Storage 
Element 6:Full :VolumeTag=06L1  Storage 
Element 7:Full :VolumeTag=07L1  Storage 
Element 8:Full :VolumeTag=08L1  Storage 
Element 9:Full :VolumeTag=09L1  Storage 
Element 10:Full :VolumeTag=10L1  Storage 
Element 11:Full :VolumeTag=11L1  Storage 
Element 12:Full :VolumeTag=12L1  Storage 
Element 13:Empty:VolumeTag=  Storage Element 
14:Empty:VolumeTag=  Storage Element 
15:Empty:VolumeTag=  Storage Element 
16:Empty:VolumeTag=  Storage Element 
17:Empty:VolumeTag=  Storage Element 18:Full 
:VolumeTag=  Storage Element 
19:Empty:VolumeTag=
 
I can load and 
unload tapes with mtx -f /dev/sg2 load/unload without 
problems.
 
My amanda.conf looks 
like this:
 
## amanda.conf - 
configurtaion file for backup routines at Videlity A/S.# Augmented from the 
sample amanda.conf provided by CS.UMD.EDU## This amanda.conf should be 
placed in /etc/amanda/BackUp/amanda.conf
 
org 
"BackUp" 
# Name of BackUp scheme
 
mailto "root"    
# report status to this adressdumpuser 
"root"  
# The user who should run the backup
 
inparallel 
4 
# maximum dumpers that will run in parallelnetusage 600 
Kbps    
# maximum usage of LAN in KB per sec
 
dumpcycle 7 
days 
# Number of days in a dump cyclerunspercycle 5 
days  
# number of dumb runs in each cycletapecycle 12 
tapes   
# number of tapes in rotation
 
bumpsize 20 
Mb   
# minimum savings (threshold) to bump level 1 -> 2bumpdays 
1   
# minimum days in each levelbumpmult 
4   
# threshold = bumbsize * bumpmult(level-1)
 
etimeout 
300 
# number of seconds per filesystem for estimates
 
runtapes 
1   
# number of tapes to be used in a single run of amdumptpchanger 
"chg-zd-mtx"   
# the tape-changer glue scripttapedev 
"/dev/nst0"  
# the no-rewind tape device usedchangerfile 
"/var/lib/amanda/BackUp/changer.conf" # path to changer.confchangerdev 
"/dev/sg2"    
# the changer device used
 
tapetype 
ultrium1    
# what kind of tape is used (see below for tapetypes)labelstr 
"^VidelityBackUp[0-9][0-9]*$"   # label 
constraint regex: all tapes must match
 
## Next part defines the holding disks which is 
the part of the harddisk amanda uses to store# data from a client still not 
written to tape.#
 
holdingdisk hd1 {    comment 
"primary holding disk"    directory 
"/backup"  
# where the holding disk is    use -30 
Mb   
# use all but 30 Mb on the holding disk}
 
infofile 
"/var/lib/amanda/BackUp/curinfo"    # database 
filenamelogdir   
"/var/lib/amanda/BackUp"    
# log directoryindexdir 
"/var/lib/amanda/BackUp/index"  # index 
directory
 
runtapes 
1   
# number of tapes to be used in a single run of amdumptpchanger 
"chg-zd-mtx"   
# the tape-changer glue scripttapedev 
"/dev/nst0"  
# the no-rewind tape device usedchangerfile "/var/lib/amanda/BackUp/changer" 
# path to changer.confchangerdev 
"/dev/sg2"    
# the changer device used
 
tapetype 
ultrium1    
# what kind of tape is used (see below for tapetypes)labelstr 
"^VidelityBackUp[0-9][0-9]*$"   # label 
constraint regex: all tapes must match
 
## Next part 
defines the holding disks which is the part of the harddisk amanda uses to 
store# data from a client still not written to 
tape.#
 
holdingdisk hd1 
{    comment "primary holding disk"    
directory 
"/backup"  
# where the holding disk is    use -30 
Mb   
# use all but 30 Mb on the holding disk}
 
infofile 
"/var/lib/amanda/BackUp/curinfo"    # database 
filenamelo

Re: problems with amlabel/amcheck

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 at 3:04pm, Mikkel Gadegaard wrote

*snip*
> tpchanger "chg-zd-mtx"   # the tape-changer glue script
> tapedev "/dev/nst0"  # the no-rewind tape device
> used
> changerfile "/var/lib/amanda/BackUp/changer.conf" # path to changer.conf
> changerdev "/dev/sg2"# the changer device used

*snip*

> tpchanger "chg-zd-mtx"   # the tape-changer glue script
> tapedev "/dev/nst0"  # the no-rewind tape device
> used
> changerfile "/var/lib/amanda/BackUp/changer" # path to changer.conf
> changerdev "/dev/sg2"# the changer device used

Did you cut and paste into your MUA wrong, or is that how the file looks?  
You've got two changerfile definitions (amont other things).  The second 
one is right.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

RE: problems with amlabel/amcheck

[Mikkel Gadegaard]

messed up copy/pasting :)

I'm using the part where changerfile is "/var/lib/amanda/BackUp/changer"

-Original Message-
From: Joshua Baker-LePain [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: 3. juli 2003 15:15
To: Mikkel Gadegaard
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: problems with amlabel/amcheck


On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 at 3:04pm, Mikkel Gadegaard wrote

*snip*
> tpchanger "chg-zd-mtx"   # the tape-changer glue
script
> tapedev "/dev/nst0"  # the no-rewind tape device
> used
> changerfile "/var/lib/amanda/BackUp/changer.conf" # path to changer.conf
> changerdev "/dev/sg2"# the changer device used

*snip*

> tpchanger "chg-zd-mtx"   # the tape-changer glue
script
> tapedev "/dev/nst0"  # the no-rewind tape device
> used
> changerfile "/var/lib/amanda/BackUp/changer" # path to changer.conf
> changerdev "/dev/sg2"# the changer device used

Did you cut and paste into your MUA wrong, or is that how the file looks?
You've got two changerfile definitions (amont other things).  The second
one is right.

--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

Re: Incremenats as big as full

[Dietmar Goldbeck]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 10:16:56AM +0100, Anthony Worrall wrote:

> tar (GNU tar) 1.13.18

everything below 1.13.19 should be upgraded _immediately_.

Prepare for at least problems with the index!

-- 
 Alles Gute / best wishes  
 Dietmar Goldbeck E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western
Civilization?  Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

RE: Fatal reading result from taper

[Josh Welch]

Paul Bijnens said:
> 
> Josh Welch wrote:
>  >
>  > Amcheck gives no erors. However, when I try to do amdump, its
>  > breaking. I've included the email from amanda below. There doesn't
>  > look to be anything particularly interesting in the logs, but I've
>  > pasted the amandad.debug from the client below. I've also pasted my
>  > disklist. I've tried searching through the groups without any success
>  >  and the faq is down right now it appears, so I appreciate any help
>  > you can give me.
>  >
>  > ## Email from amanda
>  >
>  > *** THE DUMPS DID NOT FINISH PROPERLY!
>  >
>  > The next tape Amanda expects to use is: Tape01.
>  >
>  > FAILURE AND STRANGE DUMP SUMMARY:
>  > driver: FATAL reading result from taper: Connection reset by peer
>  > mplslx1.bu /var RESULTS MISSING
> 
> It seems that you are dumper without holdingdisk, and the dump
> is passing straight to tape.  It's not taper that's crashing,
> but the connection carrying the data was closed by the other end,
> probably due to a problem on the client.
> 
> 
>  > ##amandad.debug
> ...
>  > (null): running service "/usr/lib/amanda/sendsize"
> 
> This the amandad.debug from the estimate phase, and that succeeded fine.
> Nothing else found in /tmp/amanda?  No sendbackup.debug file?
> 

Actually, I am trying to do a backup to disk, using a config I found in the
archives for setting up a "changer" on disk. Gene is of the opinion the RPM
is fubar, so I am going to try and get a compiler working on that box and
build from scratch. I'll let you know how that pans out.

Thanks,
Josh

RE: Fatal reading result from taper

[Josh Welch]

Gene Heskett said:

> Did I not already post a howto?  In this case I think you are going to 
> have to install the compiler, and build from tarball before its going 
> to work.
> 
> If you install the compiler from rpms, it can then be removed when you 
> are done, just keep track of which packkages you put in so you can 
> cleanup when you're done.
> 

Didn't see the how to, is it online somewhere? I couldn't reach
amanda.org yesterday anyway. I'll go about getting a compiler installed
on that thing and try again.

Thanks for your time,
Josh

Re: howto decide full vs. incremental ???

[Jon LaBadie]

On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 10:18:50PM -0500, Michael D. Schleif wrote:
> Thank you, all of you, for your help -- I have a working amanda!
> 
> Now, I am trying to understand amanda's built-in backup strategy.  How
> can I know when `disk' will be backed up full or incremental?
> 
> I do not have a changer, and I have more data across all disks than
> single tape capacity.  Therefore, I want to stagger full backups, such
> that on any given tape, only one (1) system is full backup and all
> others are incremental backups.


Oh my gosh, someone coming into amanda wanting it to work the way it
was designed to run.  :))   That's refreshing.  So many new amanda
admins want to schedule all fulls one day and incrementals others.

Basically you should not worry about scheduling.  That is amanda's job.
Remember, amanda is not a backup program (tar and dump are), it is a
backup scheduler.  Well a few other things as well.

Amanda's scheduler and planner are designed to spread out the full
backups over your specified dumpcycle.  You specify the dumpcycle,
not the specific days.  Let amanda decide what to do when.  As an
example, suppose a system is temporarily down just when one of its
file systems is scheduled to get a full dump.  If YOU do the scheduling,
will you remember it missed the full dump and maybe adjust the schedule
to get one the next day?  Amanda will.  Or suppose someone drops ten
cdrom images onto a file system at the same time.  Amanda will note
this and think it better to tomorrow's full backup today because the
incremental will be so big today.


Getting started (once you are ready to go online) involves deciding
on what entities to backup, whether they will fit on a single tape
(or need to be split somehow), what program to use for the backup
of each entity and how to compress if you do.

The entities are called "DiskList Entries" (DLE's).  Create your
disklist with all your entries but at the start comment all of them
out.  Uncomment one or two entries from each system (server and clients)
and make sure amcheck doesn't complain.

Before running your first "real" amdump, consider which DLE's are
exposed (uncommented).  Will level 0's of all of them fit onto a tape?
If not, comment out a few.  Remember, when amanda sees a DLE for the
first time, it MUST do a full backup of that DLE.  So do not, repeat,
do not, expect amanda to do all of your DLE's the first amdump run.

Each subsequent day uncomment a couple more DLE's.  Once amanda has
seen all the DLE's she will start moving around the level-0's and
incrementals trying to even out the size of a daily backup.  This
will take several dumpcycles (i.e. weeks) but eventually will settle
into a rhythm.

jl


-- 
Jon H. LaBadie  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322  (609) 683-7220 (fax)

to compress or not to compress ???

[Michael D. Schleif]

Yes, I am learning -- at the expense of many questions ;>

First, a brief overview:

I have five (5) Linux servers, totaling ~50 Gb used diskspace, divided
roughly even across all five.

I have several DAT tape drives, the largest of which is an HP DDS-3.  I
have twelve (12) DDS-3 tapes, and twenty (20) DDS-2 tapes, as well as
several cleaning tapes.

So far, I have configured:

dumpcycle 7
runspercycle  7
runtapes  1

I am studying _Using Amanda_ here:



I am confused about two (2) things:

[1] Should I use hardware compression?

There seem to be several schools of thought here.  I want to know how
Amanda works with hardware compression?  What are the advantages of
using software compression?  What are the disadvantages of using *both*
hardware and software compression?


[2] What are the optimal dumptypes for my situation?

Yes, I have already struggled with and overcome dump vs. GNUTAR.  My
first mistake was using comp-root and comp-user on localhost.

Yes, I understand that Amanda can facilitate planning and scheduling full
vs. incremental backups.

However, I am concerned about developing a simple recovery strategy.  I
am currently having problems with amrecover; but, I think that is due to
short vs. FQDN usage -- so, I'll save that for another time.

I am running exclusively Debian woody on all systems.  I believe that I
have a good working filesystem design.  I am on a fast network.

Yes, I come from a traditional system administrator's backup mindset,
and I do not want that to undermine Amanda's design.


What do you think?

-- 
Best Regards,

mds
mds resource
877.596.8237
-
Dare to fix things before they break . . .
-
Our capacity for understanding is inversely proportional to how much
we think we know.  The more I know, the more I know I don't know . . .
--


pgp0.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Kurt Yoder]

Michael D. Schleif said:
> [1] Should I use hardware compression?
>
> There seem to be several schools of thought here.  I want to know
> how
> Amanda works with hardware compression?  What are the advantages of
> using software compression?  What are the disadvantages of using
> *both*
> hardware and software compression?

I prefer software compression personally:

-Amanda can make a more accurate estimate of how much tape is
needed.  So if you know your tape is 20 GB, and your
software-compressed dump files total 21 GB, you know they won't all
fit. With hardware compression you just have to guess-timate

-Less bandwidth consumed if you do your compression on the client
side (eg, before it comes to the tape server)

-Less disk space used on your holding disk

-If you back up to disks instead of tapes, hardware compression is
not even an option


The only drawback to software compression that I can see is the
greater amount of cpu power consumed. For me, this is not really a
problem, since my backups all happen in the wee hours when no-one is
on my systems anyway.

-- 
Kurt Yoder
Sport & Health network administrator

Satilik SONY marka %30-40-50'ye waran daha UCUZ (kullanilmamis) birkac ürün..!

[cAn]

 Merhaba,

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daha ucuz 2 adet walkman (WM-FX521) ve 3 adet diskman
(D-NE1,D-NF611,D-FJ211) bulunmakta.
Diskman modellerini Tr'de bulamayabilirsiniz.
Эlgi alaniniz icindeyse kontak kurmanizi rica edecegim...

Ьrьn bilgilerine aюaрэdaki linklerden ulaюabilirsiniz..

* http://www.musiclub.sonystyle.com/supportcenter.jsp?categoryId=10  

Gцrьюmek ьzere, cAn


NOT:Bu ileti bir spam olmayэp tek amaз kiюiyi bilgilendirmektir.Geri dцnью
yapэlmadэрэ takdirde birdaha bu tarz bir email almayacaksэnэz!!!

Re: howto decide full vs. incremental ???

[Steven J. Backus]

Question:  If you want to occasionally take a full dump off site
for storage, how does one decide which tape?  And when to take it?

RE: to compress or not to compress ???

[Ean Kingston]

I Have the opposite viewpoint. I prefer hardware compression. It allows me to offload 
processing required to the tape drive (instead of my computers) Since some of my 
systems (including the backup server itself) can be slow, this actually speeds things 
up for me. Also, with hardware compression, I know I can restore the tape without 
having to worry about finding the right libraries and programs to do the restore. Also 
(AFAIK) you can't do remote compression with samba which I use for about half of my 
backups.

On the down side, I need more holding disk and I have to guess at my tape capacity.

As for both, don't do it. That is a huge waste of cpu and tape.  The first compression 
algorithm will work fine. The second one will waste space with its headers and such 
since it probably won't be able to get the data any smaller than the software 
compression program did.

If you don't believe me, try to zip a gzip file. See if it gets any smaller.

> -Original Message-
> From: Kurt Yoder [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2003 11:57 AM
> To: Michael D. Schleif
> Cc: amanda mailing list
> Subject: Re: to compress or not to compress ???
> 
> 
> 
> Michael D. Schleif said:
> > [1] Should I use hardware compression?
> >
> > There seem to be several schools of thought here.  I want to know
> > how
> > Amanda works with hardware compression?  What are the advantages of
> > using software compression?  What are the disadvantages of using
> > *both*
> > hardware and software compression?
> 
> I prefer software compression personally:
> 
> -Amanda can make a more accurate estimate of how much tape is
> needed.  So if you know your tape is 20 GB, and your
> software-compressed dump files total 21 GB, you know they won't all
> fit. With hardware compression you just have to guess-timate
> 
> -Less bandwidth consumed if you do your compression on the client
> side (eg, before it comes to the tape server)
> 
> -Less disk space used on your holding disk
> 
> -If you back up to disks instead of tapes, hardware compression is
> not even an option
> 
> 
> The only drawback to software compression that I can see is the
> greater amount of cpu power consumed. For me, this is not really a
> problem, since my backups all happen in the wee hours when no-one is
> on my systems anyway.
> 
> -- 
> Kurt Yoder
> Sport & Health network administrator
> 
> 

RE: to compress or not to compress ???

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 at 12:17pm, Ean Kingston wrote

> I Have the opposite viewpoint. I prefer hardware compression. It allows 
> me to offload processing required to the tape drive (instead of my 
> computers) Since some of my systems (including the backup server itself) 
> can be slow, this actually speeds things up for me. Also, with hardware 
> compression, I know I can restore the tape without having to worry about 
> finding the right libraries and programs to do the restore. Also (AFAIK) 
> you can't do remote compression with samba which I use for about half of 
> my backups.
> 
It really depends on your data.  I have filesystems which are completely 
uncompressable in software (and expand in hardware), and filesystems which 
compress to <20% of their original size.  Using software compressions lets 
me pick and choose which DLEs get compressed or not.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

Re: howto decide full vs. incremental ???

[Jon LaBadie]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 10:10:10AM -0600, Steven J. Backus wrote:
> Question:  If you want to occasionally take a full dump off site
> for storage, how does one decide which tape?  And when to take it?

You take a "dumpcycle's" worth quantity of tapes offsite.
That will be current to the date of the last tape you take.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322  (609) 683-7220 (fax)

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Paul Bijnens]

Michael D. Schleif wrote:
[1] Should I use hardware compression?

There seem to be several schools of thought here.  I want to know how
Amanda works with hardware compression?  What are the advantages of
using software compression?  What are the disadvantages of using *both*
hardware and software compression?
See Kurt's answer.  May I add that using both hardware compression
and software compression at the same time  actually lowers the
capacity of your tapedrive (a DAT-tape, you said).
If you blindly impose the compression algorithm on an already
compressed data will enlarge that data.  Now much depends on the
algorithm.  DAT-tapes use something from the "compress" family.
Try:
 compress somefile
 cat somefile.Z | compress -v | wc -c
Gzip does much better, by implementing a way to indicate
that next few bytes are not compressed.
 cat somefile.Z | gzip -v | wc -c
The only drive I know without that problem is an LTO1 drive.
see:
  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/amanda-users/message/44455

[2] What are the optimal dumptypes for my situation?
I would go for gnutar, compress client fast, index, record, and
apropriate priority (user-data = higher, system = lower).
--
Paul Bijnens, XplanationTel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUMFax  +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/  email:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
***
* I think I've got the hang of it now:  exit, ^D, ^C, ^\, ^Z, ^Q, F6, *
* quit,  ZZ, :q, :q!,  M-Z, ^X^C,  logoff, logout, close, bye,  /bye, *
* stop, end, F3, ~., ^]c, +++ ATH, disconnect, halt,  abort,  hangup, *
* PF4, F20, ^X^X, :D::D, KJOB, F14-f-e, F8-e,  kill -1 $$,  shutdown, *
* kill -9 1,  Alt-F4,  Ctrl-Alt-Del,  AltGr-NumLock,  Stop-A,  ...*
* ...  "Are you sure?"  ...   YES   ...   Phew ...   I'm out  *
***

Re: Staring From Scratch --Installing AManda

[Jon LaBadie]

This is more appropriate for amanda-users, I've redirected the message there.

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:07:28PM -0400, Harry Mbang wrote:
> Hi all,  I have reformatted my Linux box and want to try again from
> scratch.  
> 
> I was wondering if anyone has an opinion of the best source of
> information available electronically (on the web or in the documentation
> of the program).

I've always thought the "docs/INSTALL" document in the source was a good
guide to initial setup.  At least it got me able to do my first and second
installs with little list help.

> Also, in creating the Amanda user should I let the system do this by
> simply specifying --with-user=Amanda or should I create an Amanda user
> then specify --with-user=Amanda?

Most people build the software as the amanda_user.  Thus it must be
created before starting.  Same for the group identity (which needs
to be able to read the disk drive devices).


BTW why did you include 60 lines of Dietmar's message.
Did they have some bearing on your questions?

> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dietmar Goldbeck

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322  (609) 683-7220 (fax)

RE: Staring From Scratch --Installing AManda

[Harry Mbang]

No, Sorry no bearing.  Thanks a lot will try that out.

Harry.

-Original Message-
From: Jon LaBadie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2003 12:41 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: Harry Mbang
Subject: Re: Staring From Scratch --Installing AManda


This is more appropriate for amanda-users, I've redirected the message
there.

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:07:28PM -0400, Harry Mbang wrote:
> Hi all,  I have reformatted my Linux box and want to try again from
> scratch.  
> 
> I was wondering if anyone has an opinion of the best source of
> information available electronically (on the web or in the
documentation
> of the program).

I've always thought the "docs/INSTALL" document in the source was a good
guide to initial setup.  At least it got me able to do my first and
second
installs with little list help.

> Also, in creating the Amanda user should I let the system do this by
> simply specifying --with-user=Amanda or should I create an Amanda user
> then specify --with-user=Amanda?

Most people build the software as the amanda_user.  Thus it must be
created before starting.  Same for the group identity (which needs
to be able to read the disk drive devices).


BTW why did you include 60 lines of Dietmar's message.
Did they have some bearing on your questions?

> -Original Message-
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dietmar Goldbeck

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322  (609) 683-7220 (fax)

Re: Staring From Scratch --Installing AManda

[Eric Siegerman]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:40:35PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> > Also, in creating the Amanda user should I let the system do this by
> > simply specifying --with-user=Amanda or should I create an Amanda user
> > then specify --with-user=Amanda?

--with-user=foo will *not* create the "foo" user for you; you
have to do that yourself.  It doesn't matter whether you do it
before or after building Amanda, but I suspect that "foo" has to
exist by the time you install it.  Which suggests that creating
the userid before you start to build Amanda is less error-prone;
one doesn't have to remember an extra step between "make" and
"make install".

> Most people build the software as the amanda_user.

Why?  I just built it under my own account, and everything went
ok.  (I did the "make install" as root of course.)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.[EMAIL PROTECTED]
|  |  /
When I came back around from the dark side, there in front of me would
be the landing area where the crew was, and the Earth, all in the view
of my window. I couldn't help but think that there in front of me was
all of humanity, except me.
- Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Eric Siegerman]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 11:57:22AM -0400, Kurt Yoder wrote:
> I prefer software compression personally:
> 
> -Amanda can make a more accurate estimate of how much tape is
> needed.  So if you know your tape is 20 GB, and your
> software-compressed dump files total 21 GB, you know they won't all
> fit. With hardware compression you just have to guess-timate

Conversely, if you have a DLE full of something that compresses
down to 20% of its original size, Amanda will know that there's
more room on the tape for other stuff.  With hardware
compression, Amanda won't know that that DLE compresses better
than your other ones.

- Better compression, probably.  Hardware compression is
  typically some variant of LZ, isn't it?  I don't know how
  gzip -1 (the default "compress-fast") compares with that, but
  gzip -9 (the default "compress-best") does a lot better.

  Ok, here's one quickie far-from-representative test.  Sorted in
  order of decreasing size, a largish, mostly-text file, and its
  compression by compress, and by the several grades of gzip.
  Size  CPU File
  ---   
  5560320   0   amanda-2.4.4.tar
  2096458   0.88amanda-2.4.4.tar.Z
  1496904   0.68amanda-2.4.4.tar.gz1
  1227454   1.28amanda-2.4.4.tar.gz6
  1220934   2.01amanda-2.4.4.tar.gz9

  This time, even gzip -1 beat LZ.  I don't know whether that's
  typical.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.[EMAIL PROTECTED]
|  |  /
When I came back around from the dark side, there in front of me would
be the landing area where the crew was, and the Earth, all in the view
of my window. I couldn't help but think that there in front of me was
all of humanity, except me.
- Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Eric Siegerman]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:17:16PM -0400, Ean Kingston wrote:
> Also, with hardware compression, I know I can restore the tape without having
> to worry about finding the right libraries and programs to do the restore.

True.  But one can work around that by backing up / uncompressed,
and making sure it contains a (possibly statically linked) copy
of gzip.  Hmmm, something to add to my to-do list :-(

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.[EMAIL PROTECTED]
|  |  /
When I came back around from the dark side, there in front of me would
be the landing area where the crew was, and the Earth, all in the view
of my window. I couldn't help but think that there in front of me was
all of humanity, except me.
- Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot

Re: Fatal reading result from taper

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 09:56, Josh Welch wrote:
>Gene Heskett said:
>
>
>> Did I not already post a howto?  In this case I think you are
>> going to have to install the compiler, and build from tarball
>> before its going to work.
>>
>> If you install the compiler from rpms, it can then be removed when
>> you are done, just keep track of which packkages you put in so you
>> can cleanup when you're done.
>
>Didn't see the how to, is it online somewhere? I couldn't reach
>amanda.org yesterday anyway. I'll go about getting a compiler
> installed on that thing and try again.
>
>Thanks for your time,
>Josh

If I haven't lost my mind (at my age it could happen :), it should be 
in the archives of this list, just a few days old.  It even has a 
couple of attachments, which are the configuration stuff I use here.  
The attachments only totalled a bit less than 1400 bytes.

If it can't be found, I can repost it.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD [EMAIL PROTECTED] 320M
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  512M
99.26% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message
by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Super-User]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 02:18:26PM -0400, Eric Siegerman wrote:
> 
> - Better compression, probably.  Hardware compression is
>   typically some variant of LZ, isn't it?  I don't know how
>   gzip -1 (the default "compress-fast") compares with that, but
>   gzip -9 (the default "compress-best") does a lot better.
> 
>   Ok, here's one quickie far-from-representative test.  Sorted in
>   order of decreasing size, a largish, mostly-text file, and its
>   compression by compress, and by the several grades of gzip.
>   SizeCPU File
>   --- 
>   5560320   0 amanda-2.4.4.tar
>   2096458   0.88  amanda-2.4.4.tar.Z
>   1496904   0.68  amanda-2.4.4.tar.gz1
>   1227454   1.28  amanda-2.4.4.tar.gz6
>   1220934   2.01  amanda-2.4.4.tar.gz9

My tests have always shown similar results.
I wish we could do comprss-default (no -level option),
which is the same as -6, and get nearly the same compression
as -9 but with far less cpu.


-- 
Jon H. LaBadie  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322  (609) 683-7220 (fax)

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 11:42, Michael D. Schleif wrote:
>Yes, I am learning -- at the expense of many questions ;>
>
>First, a brief overview:
>
>I have five (5) Linux servers, totaling ~50 Gb used diskspace,
> divided roughly even across all five.
>
>I have several DAT tape drives, the largest of which is an HP DDS-3.
>  I have twelve (12) DDS-3 tapes, and twenty (20) DDS-2 tapes, as
> well as several cleaning tapes.
>
>So far, I have configured:
>
>dumpcycle 7
>runspercycle  7
>runtapes  1
>
You left out tapecycle, which is the number of tapes in the rotation 
pool, in this case it should be not less than 15.

>I am studying _Using Amanda_ here:
>
>   
>
>I am confused about two (2) things:
>
>[1] Should I use hardware compression?

Not if you can help it, for the reasons I'll develop.
>
>There seem to be several schools of thought here.  I want to know
> how Amanda works with hardware compression?

Amanda can use hardware compression, but since the hardware compressor 
hides the true tape capacity from amanda, you must cheat on the 
tapetype size entry, often by significant amounts.

>  What are the
> advantages of using software compression?

Amanda can know quite well how much a tape can hold because it counts 
bytes of compressed data fed to the drive.  The tradeoff of course is 
cpu horsepower to do the compression.  In a client-sever world, the 
compression can be offloaded to the client, and several clients can 
be doing their compression in parallel, so its not as big a concern 
as it first appears.

>  What are the
> disadvantages of using *both* hardware and software compression?
>
With hardware smunching, amanda has no idea how much data has actually 
been written to the tape.  Sparse stuff can compress to maybe 1/2.6 
of its original size, but amanda doesn't have any way of knowing 
that.  OTOH, feed a bunch of tar.gz's, and .bz2's to that hardware 
compressor and it will get a tummy ache and make the output data 
stream as much as 15% bigger than the input was.
>
>[2] What are the optimal dumptypes for my situation?
>
>Yes, I have already struggled with and overcome dump vs. GNUTAR.  My
>first mistake was using comp-root and comp-user on localhost.
>
>Yes, I understand that Amanda can facilitate planning and scheduling
> full vs. incremental backups.
>
>However, I am concerned about developing a simple recovery strategy.
>  I am currently having problems with amrecover; but, I think that
> is due to short vs. FQDN usage -- so, I'll save that for another
> time.

Just make sure that your tar is at least 1.13-19, and prefereably 
1.13-25.  Indexes are fubared in earlier versions.

>I am running exclusively Debian woody on all systems.  I believe
> that I have a good working filesystem design.  I am on a fast
> network.
>
>Yes, I come from a traditional system administrator's backup
> mindset, and I do not want that to undermine Amanda's design.
>
>
>What do you think?

One thing to be aware of is that a tape, once written in the 
compressed mode, remembers that, and will overwrite your choices 
unless you go to a rather detailed method of removing the compressed 
flags.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD [EMAIL PROTECTED] 320M
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  512M
99.26% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message
by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

Re: howto decide full vs. incremental ???

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 12:10, Steven J. Backus wrote:
>Question:  If you want to occasionally take a full dump off site
>for storage, how does one decide which tape?  And when to take it?

You don't take just one tape, you take the last 'dumpcycle' tapes to 
offsite.  When the next dumpcycle is done, take it offsite, and bring 
back the first set.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD [EMAIL PROTECTED] 320M
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  512M
99.26% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message
by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

Re: Staring From Scratch --Installing AManda

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 13:21, Eric Siegerman wrote:
>On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:40:35PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
>> > Also, in creating the Amanda user should I let the system do
>> > this by simply specifying --with-user=Amanda or should I create
>> > an Amanda user then specify --with-user=Amanda?
>
>--with-user=foo will *not* create the "foo" user for you; you
>have to do that yourself.  It doesn't matter whether you do it
>before or after building Amanda, but I suspect that "foo" has to
>exist by the time you install it.  Which suggests that creating
>the userid before you start to build Amanda is less error-prone;
>one doesn't have to remember an extra step between "make" and
>"make install".
>
>> Most people build the software as the amanda_user.
>
>Why?  I just built it under my own account, and everything went
>ok.  (I did the "make install" as root of course.)

Which if you follow that to its logical conclusion means that because 
you must then be a member of the group disk or backup, your default 
account will have virtually root perms.

Most of us would rather not have your own user accounts so exposed, 
and one of the reasons I'm rather adament about adding 'amanda' as 
her own account, just so the perms don't get mixed.  Amanda gets made 
a member of the group disk (or backup) in order to achieve the perms 
amanda nbeeds to run.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD [EMAIL PROTECTED] 320M
[EMAIL PROTECTED]  512M
99.26% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
Yahoo.com attornies please note, additions to this message
by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

Bug in chg-chio?

[Jack Twilley]

This has happened twice so far.  Has anyone else seen it? 

amcheck-server: slot 6: date 20030702 label twilley006 (active tape)
amcheck-server: slot Use: tape_rdlabel: tape open: of uninitialized value in numeric 
eq (==) at /usr/local/libexec/amanda/chg-chio line 396.: No such file or directory
amcheck-server: slot 2: date 20030628 label twilley002 (active tape)
amcheck-server: slot 3: date 20030629 label twilley003 (active tape)
amcheck-server: slot 4: date 20030630 label twilley004 (active tape)
amcheck-server: slot 5: date 20030701 label twilley005 (active tape)

Jack.
-- 
Jack Twilley
jmt at twilley dot org
http colon slash slash www dot twilley dot org slash tilde jmt slash


pgp0.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Michael D. Schleif]

Also sprach Gene Heskett (Thu 03 Jul 02003 at 02:51:39PM -0400):
> On Thursday 03 July 2003 11:42, Michael D. Schleif wrote:
> >Yes, I am learning -- at the expense of many questions ;>
> >
> >First, a brief overview:
> >
> >I have five (5) Linux servers, totaling ~50 Gb used diskspace,
> > divided roughly even across all five.
> >
> >I have several DAT tape drives, the largest of which is an HP DDS-3.
> >  I have twelve (12) DDS-3 tapes, and twenty (20) DDS-2 tapes, as
> > well as several cleaning tapes.
> >
> >So far, I have configured:
> >
> >dumpcycle 7
> >runspercycle  7
> >runtapes  1
> >
> You left out tapecycle, which is the number of tapes in the rotation 
> pool, in this case it should be not less than 15.

Wouldn't that be eight (8)?

runspercycle * runtapes + 1


> One thing to be aware of is that a tape, once written in the 
> compressed mode, remembers that, and will overwrite your choices 
> unless you go to a rather detailed method of removing the compressed 
> flags.

How do I do this?

These tape drives have all used compression, and many of these tapes
have been used once or twice.  So, it looks like I will *not* use
hardware compression, and I want to reap all of the benefits of that
strategy.

Also, what is the best way to turn off compression?

# sudo mt-gnu -f /dev/nst0 datcompression
Compression on.
Compression capable.
Decompression capable.

# sudo mt-gnu -f /dev/nst0 datcompression 0
Compression off.
Compression capable.
Decompression capable.

# sudo mt-gnu -f /dev/nst0 datcompression
Compression off.
Compression capable.
Decompression capable.

Will this persist across power cycles?  Will previously hardware
compressed tapes turn hardware compression back on?

What do you think?

-- 
Best Regards,

mds
mds resource
877.596.8237
-
Dare to fix things before they break . . .
-
Our capacity for understanding is inversely proportional to how much
we think we know.  The more I know, the more I know I don't know . . .
--


pgp0.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Anthony A. D. Talltree]

>True.  But one can work around that by backing up / uncompressed,
>and making sure it contains a (possibly statically linked) copy
>of gzip.

... or just write a couple of copies of a CD with gzip and whatever else
you might need.

RE: Fatal reading result from taper

[Josh Welch]

Gene Heskett said:

> If I haven't lost my mind (at my age it could happen :), it should be 
> in the archives of this list, just a few days old.  It even has a 
> couple of attachments, which are the configuration stuff I use here.  
> The attachments only totalled a bit less than 1400 bytes.
> 
> If it can't be found, I can repost it.
> 
I will confess to searching, but not browsing the archives, so I could
have missed it that way, was searching for my specific problem, not a
how-to. It would probably be a handy thing to hang out on the web 
somewhere.
Anyway, after having built from scratch and tinkered with a couple of 
other settings I now have one client backing up. It's not as painful
if you just build it according to the instructions. It does appear that
the RPM's from RedHat are not the way to go, at all. Just for kicks I
tried the 7.3 RPMs on my next client, they didn't work for me either.

Josh

Is it possible to backup several servers to one tape for 3 days?

[Anwar Ruff]

Is it possible to backup several servers to one tape
in a consecutive manner over several day (e.g., 5
days)?

Enclosed in this email are my amanda.conf and disklist
files.

Thank You,
Anwar

__
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com#
# amanda.conf - sample Amanda configuration file.  This started off life as
#   the actual config file in use at CS.UMD.EDU.

org "foo.edu"   # your organization name for reports
mailto "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"  # space separated list of operators at your 
site
dumpuser "amanda"   # the user to run dumps under

inparallel 2# maximum dumpers that will run in parallel
netusage  600 Kbps  # maximum net bandwidth for Amanda, in KB per sec

dumpcycle 1 weeks   # the number of days in the normal dump cycle
runspercycle 5 days# the number of amdump runs in dumpcycle days
tapecycle 1 tapes   # the number of tapes in rotation
bumpsize 20 Mb  # minimum savings (threshold) to bump level 1 -> 2
bumpdays 1  # minimum days at each level
bumpmult 4  # threshold = bumpsize * bumpmult^(level-1)

etimeout 300# number of seconds per filesystem for estimates.
tapedev "/dev/nst0" # the no-rewind tape device to be used
tapetype v23# what kind of tape it is (see tapetypes below)
labelstr "^CESSDaily[0-9][0-9]*$"   # label constraint regex: all tapes must match

#--#

holdingdisk hd1 {
comment "main holding disk"
directory "/var/tmp"# where the holding disk is
use -117 Mb # how much space can we use on it
}

#--#

infofile "/var/lib/amanda/CESSDaily/curinfo"# database filename
logdir   "/var/lib/amanda/CESSDaily"# log directory
indexdir "/var/lib/amanda/CESSDaily/index"  # index directory

#--#

define tapetype v23 {
comment "V23 tape used with VXA-2"  
length 63917 mbytes
filemark 3272 kbytes
speed 3301 kps
}

#--#

define dumptype global {
comment "Global definitions"
#--#
}

define dumptype always-full {
global
comment "Full dump of this filesystem always"
compress none 
priority high
dumpcycle 0 
}

define dumptype root-tar {
global
program "GNUTAR"
comment "root partitions dumped with tar"
compress none
index
exclude list "/usr/local/lib/amanda/exclude.gtar"
priority low
}

define dumptype user-tar {
root-tar
comment "user partitions dumped with tar"
priority medium
}

define dumptype high-tar {
root-tar
comment "partitions dumped with tar"
priority high
}

define dumptype comp-root-tar {
root-tar
comment "Root partitions with compression"
compress client fast
}

define dumptype comp-user-tar {
user-tar
compress client fast
}

define dumptype holding-disk {
global
comment "The master-host holding disk itself"
holdingdisk no # do not use the holding disk
priority medium
}

define dumptype comp-user {
global
comment "Non-root partitions on reasonably fast machines"
compress client fast
priority medium
}

define dumptype nocomp-user {
comp-user
comment "Non-root partitions on slow machines"
compress none
}

define dumptype comp-root {
global
comment "Root partitions with compression"
compress client fast
priority low
}

define dumptype nocomp-root {
comp-root
comment "Root partitions without compression"
compress none
}

define dumptype comp-high {
global
comment "very important partitions on fast machines"
compress client best
priority high
}

define dumptype nocomp-high {
comp-high
comment "very important partitions on slow machines"
compress none
}

define dumptype nocomp-test {
global
comment "test dump without compression, no /etc/dumpdates recording"
compress none
record no
priority medium
}

define dumptype comp-test {
nocomp-test
comment "test dump with compression, no /etc/dumpdates recording"
compress client fast
}

define interface local {
comment "a local disk"
use 1000 kbps
}

define interface eth0 {
comment "10 Mbps ethernet"
use 400 kbps
}

#-#
#   Disklist
#-#

# Cessw2.fas.nyu.edu, or 192.168.1.2 (Backup Server)
foo.edu hda3nocomp-high -1 local
foo.edu hda1nocomp-high -1 local
foo.edu hda7nocomp-high -1 local
foo.edu hda8

Re: Staring From Scratch --Installing AManda

[Eric Siegerman]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 02:59:35PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Thursday 03 July 2003 13:21, Eric Siegerman wrote:
> >On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:40:35PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> >> Most people build the software as the amanda_user.
> >
> >Why?  I just built it under my own account, and everything went
> >ok.  (I did the "make install" as root of course.)
> 
> Which if you follow that to its logical conclusion means that because 
> you must then be a member of the group disk or backup, your default 
> account will have virtually root perms.

No.  My personal account is NOT a member of the
disk/operator/backup/whatever group.  Amanda doesn't *run* as me;
I did the usual -- created an "amanda" account and configured the
package with:
--with-user=amanda --with-group=

My only question was why people find it useful to "configure
--many-options; make" Amanda as that user, instead of as
themselves.

> Most of us would rather not have your own user accounts so exposed, 

Indeed.  Myself emphatically included.

Ok, my "make install" as root is a hole, I admit, but a pretty
typical one.  (Don't get me started on the topic of GNU packages'
and automake's inscrutable, unauditable "make -n" logs!)

Hmm, maybe your point is that by doing the whole thing as
"amanda" you can avoid becoming root for the "make install"
(after the first time on a given box, of course, when some
directories might need to be created and chown'ed).  But that
only works because Amanda conflates "the user under which I run"
with "the user that owns my files", which is a security problem
in itself.

In fact, that's one of my pet peeves; Amanda should *not* have
write permission on its own files -- or be able to acquire it,
i.e.  "chmod a-w" doesn't suffice.  "Least privilege" and all
that.  (I don't know how an attacker could use the write
permission that Amanda now has, but it's prudent to start off by
assuming, until convinced otherwise, that there exists a way to
use it.)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.[EMAIL PROTECTED]
|  |  /
When I came back around from the dark side, there in front of me would
be the landing area where the crew was, and the Earth, all in the view
of my window. I couldn't help but think that there in front of me was
all of humanity, except me.
- Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot

Re: Is it possible to backup several servers to one tape for 3days?

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 at 1:02pm, Anwar Ruff wrote

> Is it possible to backup several servers to one tape
> in a consecutive manner over several day (e.g., 5
> days)?
> 
> Enclosed in this email are my amanda.conf and disklist
> files.

Amanda, by design, doesn't append to a tape.  Period.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

Starting From Scratch

[Harry Mbang]

Hi all,  
please forgive me in advance for what for most may seem  
simple minded questions, here goes:  
  
I rebuilt amanda (reintsalled), unlike the previous time I  
do not have an etc folder under /usr/local.  An amanda  
folder is found under /usr/local/share.  In it is located  
text files like tapetypes, how tos etc.  My question is  
where should i put my config folder.  How does amanda know  
where to look for the config folder?  Thanks in advances  
for any response.  
  
Harry. 

amanda-users@amanda.org

[Sterpu Victor]

I have succesfuly installed amanda.
However, on the servers I have installed drbd.
And it seems that amanda does not hork with drbd.
Or maybe amanda does not work with reiserfs partitions?
Does somewoane succesfuly tried this combination?
Even that all the checks are succesfully:
amcheck -c 
amcheck -s 
amcheck -l ,
when I try a amdump , the amandas log says:
sendsize[11909]: time 0.014: /dev/nb0: Bad magic number in super-block
while opening filesystem
sendsize[11909]: time 0.015:   DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.
sendsize[11909]: time 0.015: .
sendsize[11909]: estimate time for /mail level 0: 0.011
sendsize[11909]: no size line match in /sbin/dump output for "/mail"

I dont know where to look next.
Amanda works fine, drbd works fine, but they dont work together.


   Victor


-
This email was sent using SquirrelMail.
   "Webmail for nuts!"
http://squirrelmail.org/

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Kurt Yoder]

Assuming you're running Linux, all you need is some form of Linux
rescue disk. I've got a bunch of Debian installer cd's lying around
and have used them for similar purposes before. Probably most Linux
installer cd's can be used like this, and I'm quite certain
something like Knoppix would include all the utilities anyone would
need. Who knows, might even work to restore tapes made with
non-Linux amanda servers.

BTW, if restoring without an amanda server, doesn't one also need
amrestore? The other day I tried restoring an amanda image, and had
to run it through amrestore before I could untar it.

Eric Siegerman said:
> On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:17:16PM -0400, Ean Kingston wrote:
>> Also, with hardware compression, I know I can restore the tape
>> without having
>> to worry about finding the right libraries and programs to do the
>> restore.
>
> True.  But one can work around that by backing up / uncompressed,
> and making sure it contains a (possibly statically linked) copy
> of gzip.  Hmmm, something to add to my to-do list :-(


-- 
Kurt Yoder
Sport & Health network administrator

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Kurt Yoder]

Michael D. Schleif said:
> Also, what is the best way to turn off compression?
>
> # sudo mt-gnu -f /dev/nst0 datcompression
> Compression on.
> Compression capable.
> Decompression capable.
>
> # sudo mt-gnu -f /dev/nst0 datcompression 0
> Compression off.
> Compression capable.
> Decompression capable.
>
> # sudo mt-gnu -f /dev/nst0 datcompression
> Compression off.
> Compression capable.
> Decompression capable.
>
> Will this persist across power cycles?  Will previously hardware
> compressed tapes turn hardware compression back on?

mt datcompression 0 will work fine for you. Just make sure you run
that command every time you boot. Put it in one of your boot
scripts. I'm using debian, and made a file called "nocompress" which
contains:

#!/bin/sh
#turn off tape drive hardware compression
/bin/mt -f /dev/nst0 datcompression 0

This file resides in /etc/rc.boot and is mode -rwxr-xr-x (755).

-- 
Kurt Yoder
Sport & Health network administrator

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[George Kelbley]

restoring w/o amrestore can be done with dd, gzip, tar, and so on, way
messy compared to amrecover (or amrestore) but its possible.  That's one
of the plus's to amanda.

Kurt Yoder wrote:
> 
> Assuming you're running Linux, all you need is some form of Linux
> rescue disk. I've got a bunch of Debian installer cd's lying around
> and have used them for similar purposes before. Probably most Linux
> installer cd's can be used like this, and I'm quite certain
> something like Knoppix would include all the utilities anyone would
> need. Who knows, might even work to restore tapes made with
> non-Linux amanda servers.
> 
> BTW, if restoring without an amanda server, doesn't one also need
> amrestore? The other day I tried restoring an amanda image, and had
> to run it through amrestore before I could untar it.
> 
> Eric Siegerman said:
> > On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:17:16PM -0400, Ean Kingston wrote:
> >> Also, with hardware compression, I know I can restore the tape
> >> without having
> >> to worry about finding the right libraries and programs to do the
> >> restore.
> >
> > True.  But one can work around that by backing up / uncompressed,
> > and making sure it contains a (possibly statically linked) copy
> > of gzip.  Hmmm, something to add to my to-do list :-(
> 
> --
> Kurt Yoder
> Sport & Health network administrator

-- 
George Kelbley  System Support Group
Computer Science Department University of New Mexico
505-277-6502Fax: 505-277-6927

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 at 4:34pm, Kurt Yoder wrote

> Assuming you're running Linux, all you need is some form of Linux
> rescue disk. I've got a bunch of Debian installer cd's lying around
> and have used them for similar purposes before. Probably most Linux
> installer cd's can be used like this, and I'm quite certain
> something like Knoppix would include all the utilities anyone would
> need. Who knows, might even work to restore tapes made with
> non-Linux amanda servers.
> 
> BTW, if restoring without an amanda server, doesn't one also need
> amrestore? The other day I tried restoring an amanda image, and had
> to run it through amrestore before I could untar it.

You can do with mt, dd, (gzip), and tar/restore.  You just need to make 
sure you strip off the 32KB amanda header on the front of each tape 
"file".

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

amanda-users@amanda.org

[Jon LaBadie]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 02:29:20AM +0300, Sterpu Victor wrote:
> I have succesfuly installed amanda.
> However, on the servers I have installed drbd.
> And it seems that amanda does not hork with drbd.
> Or maybe amanda does not work with reiserfs partitions?
> Does somewoane succesfuly tried this combination?
> Even that all the checks are succesfully:
> amcheck -c 
> amcheck -s 
> amcheck -l ,
> when I try a amdump , the amandas log says:
> sendsize[11909]: time 0.014: /dev/nb0: Bad magic number in super-block
> while opening filesystem
> sendsize[11909]: time 0.015:   DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.
> sendsize[11909]: time 0.015: .
> sendsize[11909]: estimate time for /mail level 0: 0.011
> sendsize[11909]: no size line match in /sbin/dump output for "/mail"
> 
> I dont know where to look next.
> Amanda works fine, drbd works fine, but they dont work together.
> 

I've never heard of drbd ... doesn't mean anything as I don't us linux.

Does it have the same arguments and options as dump?
Did you configure amanda to know that your dump program is drbd?

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322  (609) 683-7220 (fax)

Re: Starting From Scratch

[Jon LaBadie]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 04:28:41PM -0400, Harry Mbang wrote:
> Hi all,  
> please forgive me in advance for what for most may seem  
> simple minded questions, here goes:  
>   
> I rebuilt amanda (reintsalled), unlike the previous time I  
> do not have an etc folder under /usr/local.  An amanda  
> folder is found under /usr/local/share.  In it is located  
> text files like tapetypes, how tos etc.  My question is  
> where should i put my config folder.  How does amanda know  
> where to look for the config folder?  Thanks in advances  
> for any response.  

When you "configured" amanda you specified the "prefix".
Even if you didn't, you did by accepting the default.

When you did the build, lots of local specificities, like
prefix, default config, ... are put into the man pages
that you installed.  A "man amanda" will present lots of
info including a "CONFIGURATION" section where you will
see what amanda is using for a prefix.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322  (609) 683-7220 (fax)

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Kurt Yoder]

How do you recover an amanda dump file without amrestore? I had dd'd
one to disk and tried to untar it but got the message "not a tar
file". Once I ran it through amrestore I was able to untar it
though.

George Kelbley said:
> restoring w/o amrestore can be done with dd, gzip, tar, and so on,
> way
> messy compared to amrecover (or amrestore) but its possible.  That's
> one
> of the plus's to amanda.
>
> Kurt Yoder wrote:
>>
>> Assuming you're running Linux, all you need is some form of Linux
>> rescue disk. I've got a bunch of Debian installer cd's lying
>> around
>> and have used them for similar purposes before. Probably most
>> Linux
>> installer cd's can be used like this, and I'm quite certain
>> something like Knoppix would include all the utilities anyone
>> would
>> need. Who knows, might even work to restore tapes made with
>> non-Linux amanda servers.
>>
>> BTW, if restoring without an amanda server, doesn't one also need
>> amrestore? The other day I tried restoring an amanda image, and
>> had
>> to run it through amrestore before I could untar it.
>>
>> Eric Siegerman said:
>> > On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:17:16PM -0400, Ean Kingston wrote:
>> >> Also, with hardware compression, I know I can restore the tape
>> >> without having
>> >> to worry about finding the right libraries and programs to do
>> the
>> >> restore.
>> >
>> > True.  But one can work around that by backing up /
>> uncompressed,
>> > and making sure it contains a (possibly statically linked) copy
>> > of gzip.  Hmmm, something to add to my to-do list :-(
>>
>> --
>> Kurt Yoder
>> Sport & Health network administrator
>
> --
> George KelbleySystem Support Group
> Computer Science Department   University of New Mexico
> 505-277-6502  Fax: 505-277-6927
>


-- 
Kurt Yoder
Sport & Health network administrator

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Michael D. Schleif]

Also sprach George Kelbley (Thu 03 Jul 02003 at 02:41:12PM -0600):
> restoring w/o amrestore can be done with dd, gzip, tar, and so on, way
> messy compared to amrecover (or amrestore) but its possible.  That's one
> of the plus's to amanda.
> 
> Kurt Yoder wrote:
> > 
> > Assuming you're running Linux, all you need is some form of Linux
> > rescue disk. I've got a bunch of Debian installer cd's lying around
> > and have used them for similar purposes before. Probably most Linux
> > installer cd's can be used like this, and I'm quite certain
> > something like Knoppix would include all the utilities anyone would
> > need. Who knows, might even work to restore tapes made with
> > non-Linux amanda servers.
> > 
> > BTW, if restoring without an amanda server, doesn't one also need
> > amrestore? The other day I tried restoring an amanda image, and had
> > to run it through amrestore before I could untar it.
> > 
> > Eric Siegerman said:
> > > On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:17:16PM -0400, Ean Kingston wrote:
> > >> Also, with hardware compression, I know I can restore the tape
> > >> without having
> > >> to worry about finding the right libraries and programs to do the
> > >> restore.
> > >
> > > True.  But one can work around that by backing up / uncompressed,
> > > and making sure it contains a (possibly statically linked) copy
> > > of gzip.  Hmmm, something to add to my to-do list :-(

Am I right that amrecover is useless *without* an index?

Also, using only amrestore, is it possible to get at individual
files/directories, or is it only a matter of restoring the entire
dump/tarball?

I am curious as to a procedure of manually -- without amanda -- viewing
and restoring from amanda-written tapes . . .

-- 
Best Regards,

mds
mds resource
877.596.8237
-
Dare to fix things before they break . . .
-
Our capacity for understanding is inversely proportional to how much
we think we know.  The more I know, the more I know I don't know . . .
--


pgp0.pgp
Description: PGP signature

amanda-users@amanda.org

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Sat, 5 Jul 2003 at 2:29am, Sterpu Victor wrote

> I have succesfuly installed amanda.
> However, on the servers I have installed drbd.
> And it seems that amanda does not hork with drbd.
> Or maybe amanda does not work with reiserfs partitions?
> Does somewoane succesfuly tried this combination?
> Even that all the checks are succesfully:
> amcheck -c 
> amcheck -s 
> amcheck -l ,
> when I try a amdump , the amandas log says:
> sendsize[11909]: time 0.014: /dev/nb0: Bad magic number in super-block
> while opening filesystem
> sendsize[11909]: time 0.015:   DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.
> sendsize[11909]: time 0.015: .
> sendsize[11909]: estimate time for /mail level 0: 0.011
> sendsize[11909]: no size line match in /sbin/dump output for "/mail"
> 
> I dont know where to look next.
> Amanda works fine, drbd works fine, but they dont work together.

dump is a filesystem specific utility (ext2 in this case).  There is no 
dump for ReiserFS.  Use tar instead.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

Re: Is it possible to backup several servers to one tape for 3 days?

[Jay Lessert]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 01:02:03PM -0700, Anwar Ruff wrote:
> Is it possible to backup several servers to one tape
> in a consecutive manner over several day (e.g., 5
> days)?

Not the way you're thinking.

One easy thing to do in amanda to install a large cheap holdingdisk,
set reserve to some low value, leave the tape out of the drive,
run backup for 5 days, then amflush them all to tape at once.

If you mirror or RAID the holdingdisk, it's probably as reliable
as leaving the tape in the drive and concatenating (which amanda
will not do).

-- 
Jay Lessert   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Accelerant Networks Inc.   (voice)1.503.439.3461
Beaverton OR, USA(fax)1.503.466.9472

Re: Index file is empty - cygwin - using latest verion on tar

[Michael Gabriel]

Thanks,

  It's seems to be working. I now am seeing the back up indexes 
(indices?).I'm not %100 sure of what the solution was but some of 
the things I did were

  1. Re-installed cygwin making sure that cygwin/bin was in the 
windows enviroment path.
   2. made sure that I stop cywinv services before installing 
cygwin packages.

  It's hard to say that if it was one of these two things or 
something else but anyway, thanks for your help.

Regards,

Michael.

Gene Heskett wrote:

On Wednesday 02 July 2003 00:42, Michael Gabriel wrote:
 

Hi everyone,

   I'm having trouble getting the amanda backups going under
cygwin. The server is backing up serveral other linux boxes so I
think that's ok.  The data is being sent to the server from the
cygwin box but the index file is empty.
The only thing that is showing any indication of a problem in in the
sendbackup log. which is reflected in the mail message below. I'm
sure that sed and tar (I'm using the latest version) are ok.
-rw---1 backup   backup 20 Jul  1 16:17
20030701_0.gz -rw---1 backup   backup 20 Jul  1
16:40 20030701_1.gz -rw---1 backup   backup 20 Jul 
2 11:37 20030702_0.gz

Error reported for mail.

/-- xbox   /cygdrive/c/ProgramFiles lev 0 STRANGE
sendbackup: start [xbox:/cygdrive/c/ProgramFiles level 0]
sendbackup: info BACKUP=/usr/bin/tar
sendbackup: info RECOVER_CMD=/usr/bin/gzip -dc |/usr/bin/tar -f... -
sendbackup: info COMPRESS_SUFFIX=.gz
sendbackup: info end
? sed: not found
   

It appears that sed is not in your $PATH

 

| Total bytes written: 471193600 (449MB, 802kB/s)

sendbackup: size 460150
sendbackup: end
\
The dumptype used is as follows.

define dumptype comp-user-tar {
  program "GNUTAR"
  comment "partitions dumped with tar"
  options compress-fast, index, exclude-list
"/etc/amanda/exclude.gtar" priority medium
}
Does anyone have and idea about how I can troubleshoot this problem.
I've looked throught the faq-o-matic and searched through
amanda-users.
Many thanks

Michael.
   

Also, your tar s/b 1.13-19 or 1.13-25, plain 1.13 is broken.

 

--
Michael Gabriel
CWA New Media
 |\  _,,,---,,_
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'-.  ;-;;,_		
|,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		
   '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) 

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Joshua Baker-LePain]

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 at 4:20pm, Michael D. Schleif wrote

> Am I right that amrecover is useless *without* an index?

Yep.

> Also, using only amrestore, is it possible to get at individual
> files/directories, or is it only a matter of restoring the entire
> dump/tarball?

Yes, depending.  If you use dump, you can usually pipe amrestore to 
'restore -i', the interactive restore, which will let you pick and choose.  
If you use tar, you can do a 'tar t' to get a table of contents, and then 
'tar x myfile ./mydir/myfile2' to get  particular files.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

Re: Staring From Scratch --Installing AManda

[Jon LaBadie]

On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 04:07:25PM -0400, Eric Siegerman wrote:
> 
> No.  My personal account is NOT a member of the
> disk/operator/backup/whatever group.  Amanda doesn't *run* as me;
> I did the usual -- created an "amanda" account and configured the
> package with:
> --with-user=amanda --with-group=
> 
> My only question was why people find it useful to "configure
> --many-options; make" Amanda as that user, instead of as
> themselves.
> 

Some of the software will be running as amanda_user.  I prefer to
to do the configure and build as amanda_user so that the PATH and
other environment settings (umask, etc.) are set as they will when
the backups run.  Same for doing the creation of a configuration
directory, amanda.conf, ...  Do them with the same settings things
will run with.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322  (609) 683-7220 (fax)

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[bao]

Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:

On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 at 4:20pm, Michael D. Schleif wrote

 

Am I right that amrecover is useless *without* an index?
   

Yep.
 

No argument about it.
But, I don't keep index files along with the backup image on tape. 
Before running amrecover,
I would run a script to extract and recreate the index files and use 
them to run amrecover.
Are there any drawbacks to that scheme ???

 

Also, using only amrestore, is it possible to get at individual
files/directories, or is it only a matter of restoring the entire
dump/tarball?
   

Yes, depending.  If you use dump, you can usually pipe amrestore to 
'restore -i', the interactive restore, which will let you pick and choose.  
If you use tar, you can do a 'tar t' to get a table of contents, and then 
'tar x myfile ./mydir/myfile2' to get  particular files.

 

amverify runs on same tape twice

[Kurt Yoder]

Hello folks

I've only got one tape drive with no robot, so if I have more than
one tape, I change it manually. Thus, I've set up a "manual changer"
configuration; part of that is setting "runtapes 2". So far, so
good.

Now if I run amverify, it verifies once (ok), then rewinds and
*re-verifies the same tape*. According to amverify man page, this is
because I've set runtapes to 2. I would like to set runtapes to 2 so
I can manually change tapes, but not have amverify check the same
tape twice. Is this possible?

-- 
Kurt Yoder
Sport & Health network administrator

Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Michael D. Schleif]

Also sprach Joshua Baker-LePain (Thu 03 Jul 02003 at 05:41:32PM -0400):
> On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 at 4:20pm, Michael D. Schleif wrote
> 
> > Am I right that amrecover is useless *without* an index?
> 
> Yep.
> 
> > Also, using only amrestore, is it possible to get at individual
> > files/directories, or is it only a matter of restoring the entire
> > dump/tarball?
> 
> Yes, depending.  If you use dump, you can usually pipe amrestore to 
> 'restore -i', the interactive restore, which will let you pick and choose.  
> If you use tar, you can do a 'tar t' to get a table of contents, and then 
> 'tar x myfile ./mydir/myfile2' to get  particular files.

This is where I'm getting lost:

# sudo mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind

# sudo tar tvf /dev/nst0
tar: /dev/nst0: Cannot read: Cannot allocate memory
tar: At beginning of tape, quitting now
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

What do you think?

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pgp0.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Compression and X

[Steven J. Backus]

The only compression option I can see on my mt is defcompression,
so to turn it off is:

/bin/mt -f  defcompression 0

correct?

Also, when I built amanda I did:

--enable-FEATURE=x

'cuz I thought there's some sort of X interface to amanda.  Now I'm
not so sure.  What is this x thing?

Thanks,
  Steve

Re: Bug in chg-chio?

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 14:56, Jack Twilley wrote:
>This has happened twice so far.  Has anyone else seen it?
>
>amcheck-server: slot 6: date 20030702 label twilley006 (active tape)
>amcheck-server: slot Use: tape_rdlabel: tape open: of uninitialized
> value in numeric eq (==) at /usr/local/libexec/amanda/chg-chio line
> 396.: No such file or directory amcheck-server: slot 2: date
> 20030628 label twilley002 (active tape) amcheck-server: slot 3:
> date 20030629 label twilley003 (active tape) amcheck-server: slot
> 4: date 20030630 label twilley004 (active tape) amcheck-server:
> slot 5: date 20030701 label twilley005 (active tape)
>
>Jack.

I've seen this before, but not with any regularity, and not since I 
gave it an extra 10 seconds of sleep time in the changer script so it 
didn't query the mechanism so fast.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 15:10, Michael D. Schleif wrote:
>Also sprach Gene Heskett (Thu 03 Jul 02003 at 02:51:39PM -0400):
>> On Thursday 03 July 2003 11:42, Michael D. Schleif wrote:
>> >Yes, I am learning -- at the expense of many questions ;>
>> >
>> >First, a brief overview:
>> >
>> >I have five (5) Linux servers, totaling ~50 Gb used diskspace,
>> > divided roughly even across all five.
>> >
>> >I have several DAT tape drives, the largest of which is an HP
>> > DDS-3. I have twelve (12) DDS-3 tapes, and twenty (20) DDS-2
>> > tapes, as well as several cleaning tapes.
>> >
>> >So far, I have configured:
>> >
>> >dumpcycle 7
>> >runspercycle  7
>> >runtapes  1
>>
>> You left out tapecycle, which is the number of tapes in the
>> rotation pool, in this case it should be not less than 15.
>
>Wouldn't that be eight (8)?
No, not if you don't want to be overwriting the only full you have with one that might 
just fail, leaving you with no full to anchor the recovery to.
>
>   runspercycle * runtapes + 1
>
Most of us consider that to be 2*runspercycle*runtapes+1

>
>
>> One thing to be aware of is that a tape, once written in the
>> compressed mode, remembers that, and will overwrite your choices
>> unless you go to a rather detailed method of removing the
>> compressed flags.
>
>How do I do this?
>
>These tape drives have all used compression, and many of these tapes
>have been used once or twice.  So, it looks like I will *not* use
>hardware compression, and I want to reap all of the benefits of that
>strategy.
>
Clip this script and adjust to suit.
--
#!/bin/sh
if [ `whoami` != 'root' ]; then
echo
echo "! Warning !!"
echo "fixcomp needs to be run by the user root,"
echo "else the perms on some commands will be denied."
echo
exit 1
fi

# blatently stolen from the bash manual
NUMBERS="0 1 2 3" # Increase or decrease to match the number of slots
# in your magazine, mine holds 4 DDS2 tapes
for number in $NUMBERS
do
echo "amtape DailySet1 slot "$number
su amanda -c 'amtape DailySet1 slot '$number
mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind
dd if=/dev/st0 of=./scratch bs=64K count=1
ls -l ./scratch # see how big the label is
mt -f /dev/nst0 compression off
mt -f /dev/nst0 defcompression -1
# write it back, with fixed 32k block in case the read
# above was short
dd if=./scratch of=/dev/nst0 bs=32K conv=sync
mt -f /dev/nst0 tell
# This seems to get rid of compressed headers
echo "forcing buffer flush with an 4+ meg write to tape # "$number
dd if=/dev/zero bs=32K count=130 of=/dev/st0
echo "Now reading the label"
# display it on the console to verify its undamaged
dd if=/dev/st0 bs=32K
mt -f /dev/st0 status
done
exit 0

This is probably not the only way to do it, but it seems to 
work here just fine.  This does however, assume that you 
have located the jumper or dipswitch that sets the drives default
compression status and set it to the off position.

>Also, what is the best way to turn off compression?
>
># sudo mt-gnu -f /dev/nst0 datcompression
>Compression on.
>Compression capable.
>Decompression capable.
>
># sudo mt-gnu -f /dev/nst0 datcompression 0
>Compression off.
>Compression capable.
>Decompression capable.
>
># sudo mt-gnu -f /dev/nst0 datcompression
>Compression off.
>Compression capable.
>Decompression capable.
>
>Will this persist across power cycles?

No, on powerup the drive will revert to the dipswitch settings.

>  Will previously hardware
>compressed tapes turn hardware compression back on?

Yes, as soon as the drive recognizes the tape.  The above 
script should fix that.  In my tests here, if the extra 
4 meg write isn't done, then the tape will be uncompressed, 
but the header still will be.  The extra write to force the
buffer flush seems to fix that.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD [EMAIL PROTECTED] 320M
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Re: Staring From Scratch --Installing AManda

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 16:07, Eric Siegerman wrote:
>On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 02:59:35PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> On Thursday 03 July 2003 13:21, Eric Siegerman wrote:
>> >On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 12:40:35PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
>> >> Most people build the software as the amanda_user.
>> >
>> >Why?  I just built it under my own account, and everything went
>> >ok.  (I did the "make install" as root of course.)
>>
>> Which if you follow that to its logical conclusion means that
>> because you must then be a member of the group disk or backup,
>> your default account will have virtually root perms.
>
>No.  My personal account is NOT a member of the
>disk/operator/backup/whatever group.  Amanda doesn't *run* as me;
>I did the usual -- created an "amanda" account and configured the
>package with:
>--with-user=amanda --with-group=
>
>My only question was why people find it useful to "configure
>--many-options; make" Amanda as that user, instead of as
>themselves.
>
>> Most of us would rather not have your own user accounts so
>> exposed,
>
>Indeed.  Myself emphatically included.
>
>Ok, my "make install" as root is a hole, I admit, but a pretty
>typical one.  (Don't get me started on the topic of GNU packages'
>and automake's inscrutable, unauditable "make -n" logs!)
>
And one thats required in order to get all the proper perms set.

>Hmm, maybe your point is that by doing the whole thing as
>"amanda" you can avoid becoming root for the "make install"
>(after the first time on a given box, of course, when some
>directories might need to be created and chown'ed).  But that
>only works because Amanda conflates "the user under which I run"
>with "the user that owns my files", which is a security problem
>in itself.
>
>In fact, that's one of my pet peeves; Amanda should *not* have
>write permission on its own files -- or be able to acquire it,
>i.e.  "chmod a-w" doesn't suffice.  "Least privilege" and all
>that.  (I don't know how an attacker could use the write
>permission that Amanda now has, but it's prudent to start off by
>assuming, until convinced otherwise, that there exists a way to
>use it.)

There may be, and I personally have not explored it.  I have a 
tendency to leave that to the real security experts, where an expert 
is anyone more than 50 miles from home and carrying a briefcase.  I'm 
neither :)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Re: Starting From Scratch

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 16:28, Harry Mbang wrote:
>Hi all,
>please forgive me in advance for what for most may seem
>simple minded questions, here goes:
>
>I rebuilt amanda (reintsalled), unlike the previous time I
>do not have an etc folder under /usr/local.  An amanda
>folder is found under /usr/local/share.  In it is located
>text files like tapetypes, how tos etc.  My question is
>where should i put my config folder.  How does amanda know
>where to look for the config folder?  Thanks in advances
>for any response.
>
>Harry.

That is normally a configuration time option so that its compiled in.
I think it has defaults of /usr/local/etc/amanda/, where you supply 
the appended configname, like the default DailySet

Indices and such are then kept in /usr/local/var/amanda.

OTOH, I configured mine in at the defaults.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD [EMAIL PROTECTED] 320M
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Re: to compress or not to compress ???

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 18:03, bao wrote:
>Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
>>On Thu, 3 Jul 2003 at 4:20pm, Michael D. Schleif wrote
>>
>>>Am I right that amrecover is useless *without* an index?
>>
>>Yep.
>
>No argument about it.
>But, I don't keep index files along with the backup image on tape.
>Before running amrecover,
>I would run a script to extract and recreate the index files and use
>them to run amrecover.
>Are there any drawbacks to that scheme ???

Yes.  If the indices do make it into the backup tape (I've had it 
miss-fire here and have taken other means to assure I have an up2date 
backup of them on the same tape here), they will still be a day old 
compared to the tapes actual contents.

>>>Also, using only amrestore, is it possible to get at individual
>>>files/directories, or is it only a matter of restoring the entire
>>>dump/tarball?
>>
>>Yes, depending.  If you use dump, you can usually pipe amrestore to
>>'restore -i', the interactive restore, which will let you pick and
>> choose. If you use tar, you can do a 'tar t' to get a table of
>> contents, and then 'tar x myfile ./mydir/myfile2' to get 
>> particular files.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Re: Compression and X

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 03 July 2003 21:03, Steven J. Backus wrote:
>The only compression option I can see on my mt is defcompression,
>so to turn it off is:
>
>/bin/mt -f  defcompression 0
>
>correct?
>
>Also, when I built amanda I did:
>
>--enable-FEATURE=x
>
>'cuz I thought there's some sort of X interface to amanda.  Now I'm
>not so sure.  What is this x thing?
>
>Thanks,
>  Steve
>From the ./configure --help screen:
---
Optional Features:
  --disable-FEATURE   do not include FEATURE (same as --enable-FEATURE=no)
  --enable-FEATURE[=ARG]  include FEATURE [ARG=yes]
  --disable-dependency-tracking Speeds up one-time builds
  --enable-dependency-tracking  Do not reject slow dependency extractors
  --enable-shared=PKGS  build shared libraries default=yes
  --enable-static=PKGS  build static libraries default=yes
  --enable-fast-install=PKGS  optimize for fast installation default=yes
  --disable-libtool-lock  avoid locking (might break parallel builds)
---
AFAIK there is no 'x' option.  And amanda does not have a
GUI of any kind that I'm aware of.  Its basic design is to
run autonomously, with as little human input as possible
once configured and settled into a schedule she will write
on the fly.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD [EMAIL PROTECTED] 320M
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amanda-users@amanda.org

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 04 July 2003 19:29, Sterpu Victor wrote:
>I have succesfuly installed amanda.
>However, on the servers I have installed drbd.
>And it seems that amanda does not hork with drbd.
>Or maybe amanda does not work with reiserfs partitions?
>Does somewoane succesfuly tried this combination?
>Even that all the checks are succesfully:
>amcheck -c 
>amcheck -s 
>amcheck -l ,
>when I try a amdump , the amandas log says:
>sendsize[11909]: time 0.014: /dev/nb0: Bad magic number in
> super-block while opening filesystem
>sendsize[11909]: time 0.015:   DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.
>sendsize[11909]: time 0.015: .
>sendsize[11909]: estimate time for /mail level 0: 0.011
>sendsize[11909]: no size line match in /sbin/dump output for "/mail"
>
>I dont know where to look next.
>Amanda works fine, drbd works fine, but they dont work together.
>
>
>   Victor
You can start by dumping dump.  It currently has no maintainer, and 
has been quite problematic on this list at times.  Use tar, just 
making sure its no older than 1.13-19, also 1.13-25 works fine here, 
its the latest, and you can get it via from ftp from alpha.gnu.org.

tar is considerably more versatile than dump anyway.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Renkli logolar cebinizde!!!

[Melodi Grafik Hizmetleri]

Title: SMSNET MELODI GRAFIK HABERLER
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amanda-users@amanda.org

[Rainer Hofmann]

As far as I know amanda cannot handle reiserfs, when using dump. You have to 
configure tar.

Rainer

Am Samstag, 5. Juli 2003 01:29 schrieb Sterpu Victor:
> I have succesfuly installed amanda.
> However, on the servers I have installed drbd.
> And it seems that amanda does not hork with drbd.
> Or maybe amanda does not work with reiserfs partitions?
> Does somewoane succesfuly tried this combination?
> Even that all the checks are succesfully:
> amcheck -c 
> amcheck -s 
> amcheck -l ,
> when I try a amdump , the amandas log says:
> sendsize[11909]: time 0.014: /dev/nb0: Bad magic number in super-block
> while opening filesystem
> sendsize[11909]: time 0.015:   DUMP: The ENTIRE dump is aborted.
> sendsize[11909]: time 0.015: .
> sendsize[11909]: estimate time for /mail level 0: 0.011
> sendsize[11909]: no size line match in /sbin/dump output for "/mail"
>
> I dont know where to look next.
> Amanda works fine, drbd works fine, but they dont work together.
>
>
>Victor
>
>
> -
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