Re: impressive :)
On 2011-02-26 03:17, Charles Curley wrote: What would *really* save space is for Amanda to detect that machines A, B and C all have the save version of file foo (even if they are in different places), and only actually keep one around. I suspect that would be very compute intensive at backup time, but these days That is what BackupPC does... At the expense of having the backup in a filesystem currently... And even that can be eliminated by having only meta data and checksums (sha-md5.. whatever) online on disk. (and then again at the expense of a much more complicated backend, where it would be much more complicated to restore backups when your backup server has crashed etc.) -- Paul Bijnens, XplanationTel +32 16 397.525 Interleuvenlaan 86, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM Fax +32 16 397.552 *** * I think I've got the hang of it now: exit, ^D, ^C, ^\, ^Z, ^Q, ^^, * * quit, ZZ, :q, :q!, M-Z, ^X^C, logoff, logout, close, bye, /bye, ~., * * stop, end, ^]c, +++ ATH, disconnect, halt, abort, hangup, KJOB, * * ^X^X, :D::D, kill -9 1, kill -1 $$, shutdown, init 0, Alt-F4, * * Alt-f-e, Ctrl-Alt-Del, Alt-SysRq-reisub, Stop-A, AltGr-NumLock, ... * * ... Are you sure? ... YES ... Phew ... I'm out * ***
RE: Cannot alloc contig buf for I/O error.
I have resolved the problem but not sure how. I changed device-property BLOCK_SIZE 1024k to device-property BLOCK_SIZE 1 mbytes and I rebooted the system. My amflush is running with out the errors. Robert -Original Message- From: McGraw, Robert P Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 4:49 PM To: 'amanda-users@amanda.org' Subject: RE: Cannot alloc contig buf for I/O error. -Original Message- From: owner-amanda-us...@amanda.org [mailto:owner-amanda- us...@amanda.org] On Behalf Of McGraw, Robert P Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 4:19 PM To: 'amanda-users@amanda.org' Subject: Cannot alloc contig buf for I/O error. build: VERSION=Amanda-3.2.0 on a Sun x86 Solaris 10 host I just started getting the fillowing errors. Feb 28 15:57:36 hertz.math.purdue.edu scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci10de,376@a/pci10b5,8114@0/pci1000,10b0@8/st@1,0 (st1): Feb 28 15:57:36 hertz.math.purdue.edu Cannot alloc contig buf for I/O for 1048576 blk size Feb 28 15:57:36 hertz.math.purdue.edu scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci10de,376@a/pci10b5,8114@0/pci1000,10b0@8/st@1,0 (st1): Feb 28 15:57:36 hertz.math.purdue.edu Cannot alloc contig buf for I/O for 1048576 blk size My amanda.conf file shows the following block size device-property BLOCK_SIZE 1024k I relabeled the tape to be sure I had to correct block size and still get the errors. I have been running with this setup for the last several months. why all the sudden would the block size change on me? Thanks Robert _ Robert P. McGraw, Jr. Manager, Computer SystemEMAIL: rmcg...@purdue.edu Purdue UniversityROOM: MATH-807 Department of Mathematics PHONE: (765) 494-6055 150 N. University Street West Lafayette, IN 47907-2067 [McGraw, Robert P] As a followup I see the following entries in my debug file /tmp/amanda/server/daily/taper.20110227231047.debug. Does this give any clues? Sun Feb 27 23:10:47 2011: taper: pid 15570 ruid 30002 euid 30002 version 3.2.0: start at Sun Feb 27 23:10:47 2011 Sun Feb 27 23:10:47 2011: taper: config_overrides: diskfile disklist Sun Feb 27 23:10:47 2011: taper: pid 15570 ruid 30002 euid 30002 version 3.2.0: rename at Sun Feb 27 23:10:47 2011 Sun Feb 27 23:10:47 2011: taper: chg-robot: using statefile '/local/amanda/amanda/etc/amanda/daily/chg-zd-mtx-state' Sun Feb 27 23:10:47 2011: taper: Amanda::Taper::Scan::traditional stage 1: search for oldest reusable volume Sun Feb 27 23:10:47 2011: taper: Amanda::Taper::Scan::traditional oldest reusable volume is 'D01002' Sun Feb 27 23:10:47 2011: taper: Amanda::Taper::Scan::traditional stage 1: searching oldest reusable volume 'D01002' Sun Feb 27 23:10:47 2011: taper: invoking /opt/csw/sbin/mtx -f /dev/changer/0 status Sun Feb 27 23:10:48 2011: taper: c4: updating state Sun Feb 27 23:10:48 2011: taper: c4: loading label 'D01002' Sun Feb 27 23:10:48 2011: taper: c4: requested volume is already in drive 0 Sun Feb 27 23:10:48 2011: taper: c4: polling 'tape:/dev/rmt/0cbn' to see if it's ready Sun Feb 27 23:10:51 2011: taper: c4: setting current slot to 2 Sun Feb 27 23:10:51 2011: taper: Amanda::Taper::Scan::traditional result: 'D01002' on tape:/dev/rmt/0cbn slot 2, mode 2 Mon Feb 28 03:17:38 2011: taper: Amanda::Taper::Scribe preparing to write, part size 0, using cache_inform (splitter) (no LEOM) Mon Feb 28 03:17:38 2011: taper: Starting Xfer@89e7af0 (XferSourceHolding@89b5da0 - XferDestTaperSplitter@89ea568) Mon Feb 28 03:17:38 2011: taper: Final linkage: XferSourceHolding@89b5da0 -(PULL_BUFFER)- XferElementGlue@88baf88 -(PUSH_BUFFER)- XferDestTaperSplitter@89ea568 Mon Feb 28 03:17:38 2011: taper: Building type TAPESTART header of 1048576-1048576 bytes with name='D01002' disk='' dumplevel=0 and blocksize=1048576 Mon Feb 28 03:17:42 2011: taper: invoking /opt/csw/sbin/mtx -f /dev/changer/0 status Mon Feb 28 03:17:43 2011: taper: c4: updating state Mon Feb 28 03:17:43 2011: taper: Building type SPLIT_FILE header of 1048576-1048576 bytes with name='hertz' disk='/gauss/export/varmail' dumplevel=0 and blocksize=1048576 Mon Feb 28 07:20:23 2011: taper: Amanda::Taper::Scribe preparing to write, part size 0, using cache_inform (splitter) (no LEOM) Mon Feb 28 07:20:23 2011: taper: Starting Xfer@89d73e0 (XferSourceHolding@89e7898 - XferDestTaperSplitter@89e77d0) Mon Feb 28 07:20:23 2011: taper: Final linkage: XferSourceHolding@89e7898 -(PULL_BUFFER)- XferElementGlue@8a5fe18 -(PUSH_BUFFER)- XferDestTaperSplitter@89e77d0 Mon Feb 28 07:20:23 2011: taper: Building type SPLIT_FILE header of 1048576-1048576 bytes with name='galileo' disk='/' dumplevel=0 and blocksize=1048576 Mon Feb 28 08:10:07 2011: taper: Amanda::Taper::Scribe preparing to write, part size 0, using
Amanda vs Bacula
Hello, I'm an Archlinux user planning to migrate to Free/PCBSD soon. At the moment I use Bacula to backup my desktop machine and another (old) laptop. Moreover, I've collection of archived (scanned) slides and video files which are archived on (atm) 12 LTO-2 tapes with more tapes to be filled in the future. So, considering the above backup hardware (HP Ultrium 448 tape drive) and my backup needs, I wonder whether Amanda might be better option for me? When I say 'better' I think about the following: a) ease of setup and admin work required to maintain the setup I did configure Bacula, created 3 different Catalogs (video, slides, desktop). but I lost in the past my configuration and had to scan all the tapes to restore catalog files which are atm stored in Postgresql database which is another extra requirement to admin. (Let me say that I keep Postgresql just for the Bacula needs. How does Amanda compare here? b) tools for working with the application Bacula has Bat GUI, but I use bconsole and can find my way there, but wonder how does Amanda compare here? c) bare-metal recovery So far, I never did it with Bacula, but I confess that I'm not probably ready either. Is bare-metal recovery easy/difficult with Amanda? d) spanning volumes on more than one tape and appending to the tape I see two unusual (from the Bacula user's perspective) FAQ entries: 1) How do I back up a partition that won't fit on a tape? 2) Why does Amanda not append to a tape? According to the FAQ, answer for 1) seems to be that it's possible since 2.5.0, and it looks that 3.2.x is bringing support to even better level. Correct? As far as issue 2) is concerned, I'm accustomed in Bacula to simply run a job, selecting correct Pool of tapes and Bacula appends new backup to the appropriate tape without much thinking. It looks that Amanda is using different strategy, and the following confuses me (from http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/FAQ:Why_does_Amanda_not_append_to_a_tape%3F): ...Amanda was designed to never overwrite a non-Amanda tape, nor an Amanda tape from a different configuration, nor an Amanda tape from the current configuration that is still active, i.e. has backups on the tape more recent than the dumpcycle length. Bacula also has 'file retention' parameter, but here I'm confused with interchange of the words 'append' (as used in the FAQ entry) and 'overwrite' as used in explanation? So I'd appreciate if someone can throw some more light on it helping with the final decision. Anything else which I did not include which might be worth of comparing? Sincerely, Gour -- “In the material world, conceptions of good and bad are all mental speculations…” (Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu) http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: CDBF17CA signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: ...not allowed to execute the service noop: Please add amdump to the line in //.amandahosts
amanda looks for the .amandahosts file in the home directory of the bin
user?
What is the home directory of the bin user? Is it / or /home/bin, the
default is /.
So you must create the /.amandahosts file like amanda told you to do,
have you tried it?
It is bad to use a user that have privilege, you should not use 'bin'.
Jean-Louis
Joe Konecny wrote:
I am running amanda server 3.1.0 on ubuntu server 10.10 trying to back
up a client running
Freebsd 5.2.1 and amanda client 2.5.1p3. These machines are right
next to each other and
not connected to the internet. Therefore auth=bsd is ok for now.
I am receiving this error when runing sudo -u backup amcheck Daily
ERROR: NAK r4p17: user backup from rmt170 is not allowed to execute
the service noop: Please add amdump to the line in //.amandahosts
The //.amandahosts seems strange to me.
The freebsd amanda client is set to run as bin.
The ubuntu amanda server is set to run as backup.
(client r4p17)
cat /home/bin/.amandahosts:
rmt170 backup amdump
cat /etc/hosts
10.0.0.8 r4p17
10.0.0.52 rmt170
cat /etc/inetd.conf
amanda dgram udp wait bin /usr/local/libexec/amandad amandad
-auth=bsd amdump amindexd amidxtaped
(server rmt170)
cat /etc/hosts
10.0.0.8 r4p17
10.0.0.52 rmt170
cat /etc/amanda/Daily/amanda.conf
org MyConfig
infofile /usr/amanda/state/curinfo
logdir /usr/amanda/state/log
indexdir /usr/amanda/state/index
tpchanger chg-disk:/usr/amanda/vtapes
labelstr Daily[0-9][0-9]
autolabel Daily%% EMPTY VOLUME_ERROR
tapecycle 15
dumpcycle 1 week
amrecover_changer changer
tapetype HARD-DISK
define tapetype HARD-DISK {
length 210 gbytes
filemark 4 kbytes
}
define dumptype simple-gnutar-local {
auth local
compress none
program GNUTAR
}
holdingdisk hd1 {
directory /holding
use 1740 gbytes
chunksize 1 mbyte
}
define dumptype simple-gnutar-remote {
client_username bin
auth bsd
compress none
program GNUTAR
}
cat /etc/amanda/Daily/disklist
r4p17 /etc simple-gnutar-remote
Re: ...not allowed to execute the service noop: Please add amdump to the line in //.amandahosts
Joe,
I've seen that error, I've usually found it to be a read herring.
I've found that in an otherwise correct amanda config,
- if the client is unable to resolve the IP NAME of the server
and the server NAME is in .amandahosts than we fail to authenticate.
I've resolved this by adding the amanda SERVER to the client's
/etc/hosts or adding the server IP NUMBER in .amandahosts.
YMMV,
Brian
On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 11:06:27AM -0500, Joe Konecny wrote:
I am running amanda server 3.1.0 on ubuntu server 10.10 trying to back up a
client running
Freebsd 5.2.1 and amanda client 2.5.1p3. These machines are right next to
each other and
not connected to the internet. Therefore auth=bsd is ok for now.
I am receiving this error when runing sudo -u backup amcheck Daily
ERROR: NAK r4p17: user backup from rmt170 is not allowed to execute the
service noop: Please add amdump to the line in //.amandahosts
The //.amandahosts seems strange to me.
The freebsd amanda client is set to run as bin.
The ubuntu amanda server is set to run as backup.
(client r4p17)
cat /home/bin/.amandahosts:
rmt170 backup amdump
cat /etc/hosts
10.0.0.8 r4p17
10.0.0.52 rmt170
cat /etc/inetd.conf
amanda dgram udp wait bin /usr/local/libexec/amandad amandad -auth=bsd
amdump amindexd amidxtaped
(server rmt170)
cat /etc/hosts
10.0.0.8 r4p17
10.0.0.52 rmt170
cat /etc/amanda/Daily/amanda.conf
org MyConfig
infofile /usr/amanda/state/curinfo
logdir /usr/amanda/state/log
indexdir /usr/amanda/state/index
tpchanger chg-disk:/usr/amanda/vtapes
labelstr Daily[0-9][0-9]
autolabel Daily%% EMPTY VOLUME_ERROR
tapecycle 15
dumpcycle 1 week
amrecover_changer changer
tapetype HARD-DISK
define tapetype HARD-DISK {
length 210 gbytes
filemark 4 kbytes
}
define dumptype simple-gnutar-local {
auth local
compress none
program GNUTAR
}
holdingdisk hd1 {
directory /holding
use 1740 gbytes
chunksize 1 mbyte
}
define dumptype simple-gnutar-remote {
client_username bin
auth bsd
compress none
program GNUTAR
}
cat /etc/amanda/Daily/disklist
r4p17 /etc simple-gnutar-remote
---
Brian R Cuttler brian.cutt...@wadsworth.org
Computer Systems Support(v) 518 486-1697
Wadsworth Center(f) 518 473-6384
NYS Department of HealthHelp Desk 518 473-0773
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This e-mail and any attachments may contain
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Re: ...not allowed to execute the service noop: Please add amdump to the line in //.amandahosts
On 3/1/2011 11:21 AM, Jean-Louis Martineau wrote: amanda looks for the .amandahosts file in the home directory of the bin user? What is the home directory of the bin user? Is it / or /home/bin, the default is /. So you must create the /.amandahosts file like amanda told you to do, have you tried it? It is bad to use a user that have privilege, you should not use 'bin'. Yeah sorry that should be /.amandahosts. Nevertheless the error persists. It is complaining about //.amandahosts instead of /.amandahosts. That's what doesn't make sense to me.
Re: ...not allowed to execute the service noop: Please add amdump to the line in //.amandahosts
On 3/1/2011 11:21 AM, Jean-Louis Martineau wrote: amanda looks for the .amandahosts file in the home directory of the bin user? What is the home directory of the bin user? Is it / or /home/bin, the default is /. So you must create the /.amandahosts file like amanda told you to do, have you tried it? It is bad to use a user that have privilege, you should not use 'bin'. Jean-Louis Ok... got it. It was a fqdn issue in /.amandahosts. When it said //.amandahosts it really threw me. The bin user will be taken care of... Thanks.
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Gour g...@atmarama.net wrote: Hello, I'm an Archlinux user planning to migrate to Free/PCBSD soon. At the moment I use Bacula to backup my desktop machine and another (old) laptop. Hello Gour, I'm a long time FreeBSD and amanda user. I use amanda to backup a series of desktop boxes. I can't compare with Bacula, as I've never used it, but let me provide some comments based on my experience with amanda: Moreover, I've collection of archived (scanned) slides and video files which are archived on (atm) 12 LTO-2 tapes with more tapes to be filled in the future. So, considering the above backup hardware (HP Ultrium 448 tape drive) and my backup needs, I wonder whether Amanda might be better option for me? When I say 'better' I think about the following: a) ease of setup and admin work required to maintain the setup I did configure Bacula, created 3 different Catalogs (video, slides, desktop). but I lost in the past my configuration and had to scan all the tapes to restore catalog files which are atm stored in Postgresql database which is another extra requirement to admin. (Let me say that I keep Postgresql just for the Bacula needs. How does Amanda compare here? I only configured a weekly backup run, but there's ample of flexibility to include/exclude different partitions (each with different priorities) from each box, so I assume something similar can be done with amanda. In my case I've never relied on external databases, only the (text?) files that amanda creates. And in any case, I've never really used any of the amanda admin tools anyway (see my response to your 'bare metal recovery' point) b) tools for working with the application Bacula has Bat GUI, but I use bconsole and can find my way there, but wonder how does Amanda compare here? Can't tell, don't use much of the amanda tools myself. c) bare-metal recovery So far, I never did it with Bacula, but I confess that I'm not probably ready either. Is bare-metal recovery easy/difficult with Amanda? amanda writes all backups to tape in a way that greatly facilitates recovery from a barebones box, even without having amanda installed. In fact, I've always recovered backups using standard dd, together with tar or restore. For this, it is always a good idea to print an updated label for each tape, and have the label together with the corresponding tape. That way, even if you don't have access to the amanda files that tell you which dump lives in which tape, you will be able to find the correct tape. For amanda, all backups in tape are preceded by blocks of 32 kbytes that contain clean text information on the partition, host, date, type of backup, etc, AND with instructions on how to restore the backup. You can dump any of these blocks to the screen when reading the tape with dd(1). e.g., for the first FreeBSD non-rewinding tape devide (nsa0) [fernan@taper] dd if=/dev/nsa0 bs=32k count=1 AMANDA: FILE 20050423 rho /usr/local lev 0 comp .gz program /sbin/dump To restore, position tape at start of file and run: dd if=tape bs=32k skip=1 | /usr/bin/gzip -dc | sbin/restore -f... - 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 32768 bytes transferred in 1.825817 secs (17947 bytes/sec) This tells us that the next file in the tape is a backup of the host named 'rho' corresponding to the '/usr/local' partition, which was done by dump(1) on April 23rd, 2005. Then, if we want to restore this next file, we're just positioned in the right place, at the start of the next file, so we just need to run [fernan@taper] dd if=/dev/nsa0 bs=32k | /usr/bin/gzip -dc | sbin/restore -i -f - d) spanning volumes on more than one tape and appending to the tape Never did this myself, I'm sorry. Hope this helps. I'm sure others will chime in with more details. Cheers, -- fernan
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 17:16:32 +0100 Gour g...@atmarama.net wrote: Hello, I'm an Archlinux user planning to migrate to Free/PCBSD soon. At the moment I use Bacula to backup my desktop machine and another (old) laptop. Moreover, I've collection of archived (scanned) slides and video files which are archived on (atm) 12 LTO-2 tapes with more tapes to be filled in the future. So, considering the above backup hardware (HP Ultrium 448 tape drive) and my backup needs, I wonder whether Amanda might be better option for me? It might; see below. I have not experimented with Bacula in a long time. I trust it has improved. When I say 'better' I think about the following: a) ease of setup and admin work required to maintain the setup I did configure Bacula, created 3 different Catalogs (video, slides, desktop). but I lost in the past my configuration and had to scan all the tapes to restore catalog files which are atm stored in Postgresql database which is another extra requirement to admin. (Let me say that I keep Postgresql just for the Bacula needs. How does Amanda compare here? b) tools for working with the application Bacula has Bat GUI, but I use bconsole and can find my way there, but wonder how does Amanda compare here? Amanda does not have a GUI at all. Zmanda sells a GUI, but I have not used it. Amanda configuration is done with some scripts, thereafter with editing of configuration files. It is my experience that once you get the configuration files set up, everything is very stable. c) bare-metal recovery So far, I never did it with Bacula, but I confess that I'm not probably ready either. Is bare-metal recovery easy/difficult with Amanda? Amanda does not address bare metal recovery. I, however, do. http://www.charlescurley.com/Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery-HOWTO.html. Looking at the docs for Bacula 5.0.3 (30 August 2010), I suspect that the Bacula USB bare metal code might be easier to use than mine. d) spanning volumes on more than one tape and appending to the tape I see two unusual (from the Bacula user's perspective) FAQ entries: 1) How do I back up a partition that won't fit on a tape? The quantum unit of backup in Amanda is the Disk List entry (DLE). A DLE may cover more than one partition or a portion of a partition. You can use exclusions to further refine and nest DLEs. 2) Why does Amanda not append to a tape? According to the FAQ, answer for 1) seems to be that it's possible since 2.5.0, and it looks that 3.2.x is bringing support to even better level. Correct? As far as issue 2) is concerned, I'm accustomed in Bacula to simply run a job, selecting correct Pool of tapes and Bacula appends new backup to the appropriate tape without much thinking. It looks that Amanda is using different strategy, and the following confuses me (from http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/FAQ:Why_does_Amanda_not_append_to_a_tape%3F): ...Amanda was designed to never overwrite a non-Amanda tape, nor an Amanda tape from a different configuration, nor an Amanda tape from the current configuration that is still active, i.e. has backups on the tape more recent than the dumpcycle length. Bacula also has 'file retention' parameter, but here I'm confused with interchange of the words 'append' (as used in the FAQ entry) and 'overwrite' as used in explanation? So I'd appreciate if someone can throw some more light on it helping with the final decision. One thing that concerns me with appending is that if the tape or the tape drive goes bad during the append operation, you run the risk of clobbering no only the appended material but also the previous material. Having seen this happen, I prefer to avoid it. Tape space is much cheaper than your data. Also, with virtual tapes (vtapes in Amandaese), the question is meaningless. It is the total space available in the partition that is critical, not the available space on each vtape. Anything else which I did not include which might be worth of comparing? One of these days your tape drive is going to wear out. You may find it expedient to replace it with disk drives loaded with vtapes. Amanda has supported vtapes for years and the system works quite well. If I understand the Bacula docs, vtape support was new, experimental, and not for production use as of version 3.0. I don't see anything in the docs that indicates that has changed since. http://www.bacula.org/5.0.x-manuals/en/main/main/New_Features_in_3_0_0.html#SECTION008245000, http://www.bacula.org/en/dev-manual/main/main/Current_State_Bacula.html For me, the lack of vtapes in Bacula would be a show stopper. -- Charles Curley /\ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ /Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com/ \No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0
RE: Cannot alloc contig buf for I/O error.
Pieter, Thanks very much for the bug report. I will keep an eye on this. I agree I think it was the reboot. I do have 6GB of memory. Robert -Original Message- From: Pieter Bowman [mailto:bow...@math.utah.edu] Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2011 12:13 PM To: McGraw, Robert P Cc: bow...@math.utah.edu; 'amanda-users@amanda.org' Subject: RE: Cannot alloc contig buf for I/O error. ... I have resolved the problem but not sure how. I changed device-property BLOCK_SIZE 1024k to device-property BLOCK_SIZE 1 mbytes and I rebooted the system. My amflush is running with out the errors. ... I did a little checking, but the only related thing I found was on a page talking about Sun StorEdge QFS and Sun StorEdge SAM-FS Limitations. The advice suggested is: The current workaround is to increase the system memory to at least 4 gigabytes. This problem is being tracked under Solaris bug 6334803. I checked the Oracle knowledge-base, but can't find anything related. I suspect the reboot was the thing that did the trick. You might also need to get any OS patches (if you can). Pieter
RE: Cannot alloc contig buf for I/O error.
... I have resolved the problem but not sure how. I changed device-property BLOCK_SIZE 1024k to device-property BLOCK_SIZE 1 mbytes and I rebooted the system. My amflush is running with out the errors. ... I did a little checking, but the only related thing I found was on a page talking about Sun StorEdge QFS and Sun StorEdge SAM-FS Limitations. The advice suggested is: The current workaround is to increase the system memory to at least 4 gigabytes. This problem is being tracked under Solaris bug 6334803. I checked the Oracle knowledge-base, but can't find anything related. I suspect the reboot was the thing that did the trick. You might also need to get any OS patches (if you can). Pieter
Re: Cannot alloc contig buf for I/O error.
On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 12:19:48PM -0500, McGraw, Robert P wrote: Pieter, Thanks very much for the bug report. I will keep an eye on this. I agree I think it was the reboot. I do have 6GB of memory. I'd also guess it was the reboot. Particularly as 1024K == 1048576 == 1MB. -- Jon H. LaBadie j...@jgcomp.com JG Computing 12027 Creekbend Drive (703) 787-0884 Reston, VA 20194 (703) 787-0922 (fax)
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
There are a lot of issues and questions here, and some of them can be very personal. For, example, I'm totally happy with a simple command line interface, whereas some people won't even consider a piece of software unless it has some sort of graphical interface, even if it is just a web interface. The last few days, my boss and I struggled with a new version of lmgrd (license manager daemon) that required x11 and java components for a GUI install and configure application. This was on a Solaris server that has no graphics card, no physical monitor or keyboard, only a command line console over a serial port. With no command line interface for the install, I had to install several more packages to my OS to get the pieces of X11 and java that were required; as well as configuring sshd to allow X11 forwarding, so that we could install it from our Mac OS desktops using ssh to the server with X11 forwarding back to our desktops. It would have been a gazillion times easier to do `./install` or some such from the command line on the server. But, their support of Unix seems to be grudging, at best; and, we're not about to run a Windows server. Anyway, that's just by way of illustration. If you want a general sense of why I like Amanda, see http://blogs.umass.edu/choogend/2007/09/27/ten-things-i-like-about-amanda/ . It's slightly dated, but still pertinent, in spite of both Amanda and Bacula having seen a huge amount of development work in the last few years. I'll provide some comments inline below. I'm sure some others will speak up as well. On 3/1/11 11:16 AM, Gour wrote: Hello, I'm an Archlinux user planning to migrate to Free/PCBSD soon. At the moment I use Bacula to backup my desktop machine and another (old) laptop. Moreover, I've collection of archived (scanned) slides and video files which are archived on (atm) 12 LTO-2 tapes with more tapes to be filled in the future. So, considering the above backup hardware (HP Ultrium 448 tape drive) and my backup needs, I wonder whether Amanda might be better option for me? When I say 'better' I think about the following: a) ease of setup and admin work required to maintain the setup I did configure Bacula, created 3 different Catalogs (video, slides, desktop). but I lost in the past my configuration and had to scan all the tapes to restore catalog files which are atm stored in Postgresql database which is another extra requirement to admin. (Let me say that I keep Postgresql just for the Bacula needs. How does Amanda compare here? That was a significant part of my choosing Amanda. It is pretty much straight to the point. You don't have to install and configure an SQL database (and manage it's tuning and performance); you don't have to configure multiple server daemons (storage, database, backup); it is run from the OS (cron), so you don't have to worry about whether it is still running or not (having to put in a nagios module to watch it); it uses native tools on the OS, so you don't have to worry about being able to read the tapes if your backup server goes belly up; and I believe the configuration of Amanda is much easier, as long as you get the point of the planning strategy that Amanda uses -- http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/FAQ:How_are_backup_levels_defined_and_how_does_Amanda_use_them%3F . I happen to *really* like that strategy. It minimizes demand on the network, on the servers, on the tape storage, etc., by smoothing that demand over the dump cycle. Once you get to know Amanda, traditional backup strategies seem *so* confining and demanding. b) tools for working with the application Bacula has Bat GUI, but I use bconsole and can find my way there, but wonder how does Amanda compare here? If you go with the enterprise edition from Zmanda, you can get a graphical console that is very advanced. Personally, I think Amanda is straightforward enough that there really isn't any need for a GUI of any sort. There are a variety of command line means of getting information and checking configurations. The man pages give info on that and the wiki gives a lot more. You've been there already -- http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Main_Page . c) bare-metal recovery So far, I never did it with Bacula, but I confess that I'm not probably ready either. Is bare-metal recovery easy/difficult with Amanda? Bare metal is bare metal. I don't think there is much difference in concept getting your system back up. The huge difference is that Amanda tapes can be read with native OS tools. So, you don't have to get Amanda installed and reconfigured in order to access your tapes. If you have your email reports and know when the last full was for the system of interest, you can recover those using a base OS install and get back your Amanda configuration and indexes. After that, you can go ahead and use Amanda command line tools to navigate the indexes and pull more stuff back (without having to worry about databases, storage
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 10:27:39 -0700 Charles Curley charlescur...@charlescurley.com wrote: It might; see below. Let's see.. It is my experience that once you get the configuration files set up, everything is very stable. That's good. Amanda does not address bare metal recovery. I, however, do. http://www.charlescurley.com/Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery-HOWTO.html. Nice article. The quantum unit of backup in Amanda is the Disk List entry (DLE). A DLE may cover more than one partition or a portion of a partition. You can use exclusions to further refine and nest DLEs. That's clear. One thing that concerns me with appending is that if the tape or the tape drive goes bad during the append operation, you run the risk of clobbering no only the appended material but also the previous material. Having seen this happen, I prefer to avoid it. Tape space is much cheaper than your data. I see... Also, with virtual tapes (vtapes in Amandaese), the question is meaningless. It is the total space available in the partition that is critical, not the available space on each vtape. So, I can create as many vtapes as I like and then dump those to the tape and they can span many tapes if required? One of these days your tape drive is going to wear out. You may find it expedient to replace it with disk drives loaded with vtapes. Well, my 'multimedia' archive is meant to be archived and here I assume tapes, not on the movable hard disks. For me, the lack of vtapes in Bacula would be a show stopper. Thank you for your input...I'm going to take a closer look at vtapes in wiki. Sincerely, Gour -- “In the material world, conceptions of good and bad are all mental speculations…” (Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu) http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: CDBF17CA signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:25:22 -0500 Chris Hoogendyk hoogen...@bio.umass.edu wrote: There are a lot of issues and questions here, and some of them can be very personal. For, example, I'm totally happy with a simple command line interface, whereas some people won't even consider a piece of software unless it has some sort of graphical interface, even if it is just a web interface. I like cli and do not have problem with it. ;) Anyway, that's just by way of illustration. When you mentioned Java, I had enough. :-) If you want a general sense of why I like Amanda, see http://blogs.umass.edu/choogend/2007/09/27/ten-things-i-like-about-amanda/ . It's slightly dated, but still pertinent, in spite of both Amanda and Bacula having seen a huge amount of development work in the last few years. Very nice article. I really enjoyed it. ;) That was a significant part of my choosing Amanda. It is pretty much straight to the point. You don't have to install and configure an SQL database (and manage it's tuning and performance); you don't have to configure multiple server daemons (storage, database, backup); it is run from the OS (cron), so you don't have to worry about whether it is still running or not (having to put in a nagios module to watch it); it uses native tools on the OS, so you don't have to worry about being able to read the tapes if your backup server goes belly up; and I believe the configuration of Amanda is much easier, as long as you get the point of the planning strategy that Amanda uses -- Huh...this is very true and compelling... If you go with the enterprise edition from Zmanda, you can get a graphical console that is very advanced. I'll stay with community version, but don't have need for gui. Bare metal is bare metal. I don't think there is much difference in concept getting your system back up. The huge difference is that Amanda tapes can be read with native OS tools. So, you don't have to get Amanda installed and reconfigured in order to access your tapes. This is huge advantage. append is the idea that one backup run can be added to the end of a tape used by the previous backup run, continuing until the tape is full. Some (including me) are philosophically against that. It poses risks of losing all those backups if one fails in writing to the tape, and it eliminates the redundancy of your backups by putting all (or many of) your eggs in one basket. I prefer more tapes and don't mind if they happen to be largely empty. That just means I still have growth for the future, which is always an issue. Heh...more eggs in the basket is good explanation. overwrite is when a tape comes around for being re-used. Well, I understand about 'append' 'overwrite', but wonder why the FAQ entry is named Why does Amanda not *append* to a tape? while the answer speaks about: ...Amanda was designed to never *overwrite* a non-Amanda tape.. It looks that FAQ entry mixes the concepts? So, the re-use of tapes by Amanda is somewhat simpler. Right. No need to extra layer of Pools as in Bacula...We like simiplicity. It is controlled by the tape cycle. If you want to use a tape as an archive (set aside and not re-used), you can use amadmin to mark that tape as no-reuse. This is nice simple. We might use it for our 'multimedia archive'. ;) I hope that helps. Yeah...I'm thankful to all those who responded and I believe I'm going to install Amanda. :-) Question: considering that I may start using Amanda while still being on x86_64 Linux, what would be procedure to migrate my setup on x86_64 Free(PC)BSD? And there is one gotcha with Amanda: posting from Gmane does not work...if anyone has idea how to fix it it, it would be great!! Sincerely, Gour (new Amanda user preferring to read/post_to mailing lists via Gmane) -- “In the material world, conceptions of good and bad are all mental speculations…” (Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu) http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: CDBF17CA signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 20:36:20 +0100 Gour g...@atmarama.net wrote: Amanda does not address bare metal recovery. I, however, do. http://www.charlescurley.com/Linux-Complete-Backup-and-Recovery-HOWTO.html. Nice article. Thanks Also, with virtual tapes (vtapes in Amandaese), the question is meaningless. It is the total space available in the partition that is critical, not the available space on each vtape. So, I can create as many vtapes as I like and then dump those to the tape and they can span many tapes if required? Nope. You leave virtual tapes on the hard drive. You don't bother with tapes at all. Everything is in a file on hard drive, so you can use the usual file handling tools to copy them around, e.g. for off-site backups. Oh, and something I missed earlier: you can span tapes. (Defined as sending one backup to more than one tape.) You set a configuration value to the maximum number of tapes to span. E.g.: I allow two. Most of the time Amanda uses one. However I have a few large DLEs. Those span two tapes when they get a full backup. It works just fine on vtapes. With physical tapes, you would need a changer or a human attendant. -- Charles Curley /\ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ /Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com/ \No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Gour g...@atmarama.net wrote: Question: considering that I may start using Amanda while still being on x86_64 Linux, what would be procedure to migrate my setup on x86_64 Free(PC)BSD? Don't use dump if you're planning to migrate. You may decide later to use dump(1) once you're settled with an OS/platform. Because it is low-level, dump is usually a vendor-specific command. Also, because it works at the partition level, it is tied to one or more filesystem(s). The linux dump command works with ext2/3/4, whereas the FreeBSD dump works with UFS (the native FreeBSD filesystem type). If you use more exotic filesystems (reiserfs, xfs) you may need to use yet another dump command. I would bet that a dump of an ext2 partition generated using linux's dump(1) would not be readable by FreeBSD's restore(1), but I might be wrong. -- fernan
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 13:01:28 -0700 Charles Curley charlescur...@charlescurley.com wrote: Nope. You leave virtual tapes on the hard drive. You don't bother with tapes at all. Ahh...but I want to continue using my LTO-2 drive and tapes. Oh, and something I missed earlier: you can span tapes. (Defined as sending one backup to more than one tape.) You set a configuration value to the maximum number of tapes to span. E.g.: I allow two. Most of the time Amanda uses one. OK. That's nice to hear. However I have a few large DLEs. Those span two tapes when they get a full backup. It works just fine on vtapes. Same here. Converting one old Hi-8 video tape, means 30GB of data. With physical tapes, you would need a changer or a human attendant. Only human servant is on disposal here. :-) Sincerely, Gour -- “In the material world, conceptions of good and bad are all mental speculations…” (Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu) http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: CDBF17CA signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 17:12:26 -0300 Fernan Aguero fernan.agu...@gmail.com wrote: Don't use dump if you're planning to migrate. You may decide later to use dump(1) once you're settled with an OS/platform. Ahh...this is good point. Thank you. We'll use tar then. If you use more exotic filesystems (reiserfs, xfs) you may need to use yet another dump command. On Linux I use ext4, but plan to use zfs on FreeBSD. Sincerely, Gour -- “In the material world, conceptions of good and bad are all mental speculations…” (Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu) http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: CDBF17CA signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 21:22:32 +0100 Gour g...@atmarama.net wrote: On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 13:01:28 -0700 Charles Curley charlescur...@charlescurley.com wrote: Nope. You leave virtual tapes on the hard drive. You don't bother with tapes at all. Ahh...but I want to continue using my LTO-2 drive and tapes. Go right ahead. My concern is that physical tapes die, often unexpectedly, and at that time your choice is either to buy a new tape drive or toss your tapes. The latter is attractive if you already have a known good alternative up and running. -- Charles Curley /\ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ /Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com/ \No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 20:51:09 +0100 Gour g...@atmarama.net wrote: Question: considering that I may start using Amanda while still being on x86_64 Linux, what would be procedure to migrate my setup on x86_64 Free(PC)BSD? As has been mentioned, use tar rather than dump. Specifically gnu tar. Amanda keeps some data around to make things easier. I tarball those up and toss them onto my backup external drives. I can (and have) taken that from one machine to another and made the new one the backup server with no hiccup. One of these days I'll get around to posting an article on it on my blog, and will let this list know. -- Charles Curley /\ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ /Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com/ \No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: Amanda vs Bacula
On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 14:21:36 -0700 Charles Curley charlescur...@charlescurley.com wrote: Go right ahead. My concern is that physical tapes die, often unexpectedly, and at that time your choice is either to buy a new tape drive or toss your tapes. Well, hard disks die too. :-) The latter is attractive if you already have a known good alternative up and running. In order to have some redundancy, Bacula has 'Copy Job' option to duplicate volume. Probably it can be (somehow) achieved in Amanda setup? Sincerely, Gour -- “In the material world, conceptions of good and bad are all mental speculations…” (Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu) http://atmarama.net | Hlapicina (Croatia) | GPG: CDBF17CA signature.asc Description: PGP signature
