Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
I managed to track down the source of my original problem, and decided
it was worth posting to the end of this ridiculous thread just in case
it's useful for future googlers. The cause was the empty value - two
quotes at the end of this:
$Conf{RsyncShareName} = [
'/cygdrive/c',
''
];
So don't do this - it causes an otherwise fine backup (AFAICT) to show
on the main status screen as needing attention, but the only error
in the log is a
Backup aborted ()
at the end.
I believe I may have gotten the syntax from an example of another
rule, perhaps the files exclude, and I believe it might be useful when
you're working with long lists (perhaps externally generated/sorted)
and want to be sure to have a comma at the end of every line.
But not with the RsyncShareName variable. Here is a correct example:
$Conf{RsyncShareName} = [
'/cygdrive/c'
];
Please don't reply to this unless you feel it's important, e.g.
correcting something for the record. If you want to give me meta
feedback - e.g. suggestions for improving the manner in which I
interact with the list - feel free to do so in response to the new
thread I've just started here:
http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.backup.backuppc.general
I just can't bear the thought of this one going on any further 8-)
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What are the key obstacles that have prevented many mid-market businesses
from deploying virtual desktops? How do next-generation virtual desktops
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Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On 9/8/2011 3:01 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote:
I managed to track down the source of my original problem, and decided
it was worth posting to the end of this ridiculous thread just in case
it's useful for future googlers. The cause was the empty value - two
quotes at the end of this:
$Conf{RsyncShareName} = [
'/cygdrive/c',
''
];
snip
I believe I may have gotten the syntax from an example of another
rule, perhaps the files exclude, and I believe it might be useful when
you're working with long lists (perhaps externally generated/sorted)
and want to be sure to have a comma at the end of every line.
But not with the RsyncShareName variable. Here is a correct example:
$Conf{RsyncShareName} = [
'/cygdrive/c'
];
Just a note that a comma at the end of the last element in an array or
hash is perfectly fine in Perl.
This is also a correct example:
$Conf{RsyncShareName} = [
'/cygdrive/c',
];
--
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--
Doing More with Less: The Next Generation Virtual Desktop
What are the key obstacles that have prevented many mid-market businesses
from deploying virtual desktops? How do next-generation virtual desktops
provide companies an easier-to-deploy, easier-to-manage and more affordable
virtual desktop model.http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51426474/
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Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
+1. This was the exact point I was trying to make. As an additional point to the original poster: you said somethng like OK, I'll start over, but with my original config and pool.. NO!!! Start with a 100% clean setup. Make it work, and document EVERY LITTLE THING you do to make that happen. THEN start making SMALL configuration changes, again documenting along the way. It's better to start from success and make small changes than to start from failure. With failure, you have no way of knowing if the changes you're making are having any effect... Timothy J. Massey Out of the Box Solutions Inc. Sent from my iPad On Sep 3, 2011, at 11:47 PM, Jeffrey J. Kosowsky backu...@kosowsky.org wrote: hans...@gmail.com wrote at about 14:18:41 +0700 on Saturday, September 3, 2011: On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Timothy J Massey tmas...@obscorp.comwrote: But would probably be a very good idea. What would be an even better idea would be to grab a spare PC (or a virtual guest) and test it from a completely clean installation. And document the *heck* out of what you do: you *will* be doing it again (and again and again). Well the whole thing is a test system, and I'm not that concerned with figuring out what went wrong vs moving forward, so I guess I'll just wipe and restart with a clean OS. Since I want to use the BackupPC 3.1 package (eventual production system will be on CentOS5), while I'm at it I'll use the Ubuntu version it's designed for, Lucid 10.04, rather than the latest Natty 11.04. Hopefully will eliminate the problems I'm seeing un/re- installing from the package system. I plan to keep the pool folders and of course my long-tweaked config.pl, but will start off from the clean install with as close to defaults as possible with a small static target share to test with, then make the changes a little at a time only after I've got the basics working right. Which as you say I should've done from the start. . . In the meantime there are a few unanswered questions in the thread above if anyone has the information to ontribute more detailed responses I'm sure it will help others googling later on. . . Just a piece of friendly advice... you seem to have posted dozens of posts in the past 24 hours or so... you keep making multiple, often non-standard or nonsensical changes to a standard configuration... and are asking multiple questions as you dig yourself deeper. Why don't you pursue this in a rational and organized approach? Get the basic system working with no modifications. Verify that it works, play with it, and get comfortable with the default setup and behaviors. Then step-by-step make one change at a time. If the change works as expected, then move on to the next change. If it doesn't then you know the exact source of the problem and can either troubleshoot it yourself (ideal) or ask a specific question to the list. What you are doing now is confusing yourself and probably most of the readers of the list. Pretty soon people will get tired of answering you or will lose track of all the questions and changes you have made meaning that they won't be around to help you when you really need it. Thanks -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
This is my last reply to this thread. Explained below: hans...@gmail.com wrote on 09/04/2011 01:41:57 AM: (I didn't realize BPC permissions could vary from one distro to another). Snip Re OS choices, I don't have the access, knowledge or desire to do my initial learning/experimentation in the production CentOS CLI environment; for many aspects it's so much easier to work with a distro like Ubuntu at this stage. Once I'm confident I've got the BPC side of things working just right, the CentOS guy can set up the production server however he likes. So, you understand that each distribution is going to set things up differently, which is very likely to contribute to future problems, yet you decide to voluntarily deal with such problems. All of this after stating that you do not have sufficient skills to even know when you *might* be running into problems. My time is too valuable to put band-aids on people who after being told not to run with scissors (and acknowledge the stupidity of running with scissors), insist on doing it (again). My ultimate goal is to have a self-contained BackupPC HDD - conf and log physically under TOPDIR - which in the event of a disaster can be mounted to a new host running an arbitrary distro, possibly needing to be created by a staffer even more ignorant of Linux than myself supported by a step-by-step howto. Ideally I'd like to figure out how to create a customized BackupPC LiveCD that could be stored with the drive(s) offsite. But seeing as I'm already replying to this one, I will add one more thing (and not politely, because I'm annoyed): Your solution demonstrates what is to me a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the role of a backup server. You want to dangle a hard drive onto a production server, put BackupPC on that server and consider that a backup? This is wrong on *SO* many levels. It's the wrong configuration, it's the wrong tool and it's serving a purpose that makes almost no sense. Why would you create a solution such that when one system fails, you risk losing both the production data AND THE BACKUP DATA all at the same time. Imagine a power supply failure. Couldn't it take out both hard drives? Sure can. How about a malicious user that runs rm -rf /. Gonna wipe out the backup data too. I can come up with a DOZEN scenarios with zero effort. If a 35% solution works for you, great. But most people would usually prefer a more useful one. These goals also support my doing the learning/configuration work on an alternative distro. Ah, but your backwards of accomplishing this does not encourage at least me to help you in the least. *You* may want to learn all those differences, but I sure do not want to waste my time teaching them to you. Why should I? This is not a new-linux-traning list. It's the BackupPC list. Yet you, in your ignorance, *will* make the rest of us teach you just because you cannot identify the difference between a new-linux-user mistake and a new-BackupPC-user mistake. That happens every day around here. BUT YOU ARE INTENTIONALLY MAKING THE PROBLEM WORSE, even AFTER we have told you NOT TO! So you are on your own. After all, you have the source. Feel free to use it. But for now, I am starting from scratch with 3.1 on Lucid, working step by step in departing from the defaults, testing and keeping careful notes in case I need to come back here with further issues, so as not to waste you guys' time further. Too late. Timothy J. Massey Out of the Box Solutions, Inc. Creative IT Solutions Made Simple! http://www.OutOfTheBoxSolutions.com tmas...@obscorp.com 22108 Harper Ave. St. Clair Shores, MI 48080 Office: (800)750-4OBS (4627) Cell: (586)945-8796 -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 03/09/11 08:36, hans...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 5:03 AM, hans...@gmail.com mailto:hans...@gmail.com wrote: This time I'm planning to delete the backuppc user Is anything more than removing the line from /etc/passwd required for this? as well as: /var/lib/backuppc /etc/backuppc /var/log/backuppc /usr/share/backuppc I haven't been able to respond until now, and I know most of this has been resolved by now, but I thought I'd respond anyway... (my phone email address isn't allowed to post messages). I think the answer to most of this might have been: apt-get --purge remove backuppc This should remove every trace of the package ever having been installed. I only mention this because it might come in handy in the future for you. In addition, you do realise that every distribution of linux can be installed with, or without, the graphical user interface (X Windows + window manager/etc). In fact, you could even install and setup your server with it installed and then un-install it later, or vice-versa Linux (and generally most distributions) are quite flexible. Good luck with your learning curve, and try to take smaller steps :) Regards, Adam - -- Adam Goryachev Website Managers www.websitemanagers.com.au -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk5kD2QACgkQGyoxogrTyiXv7gCfTDzZNGut7rsLTA2QL+No25Tr iDgAoLTrkJgCl2V8pTpNNhm+Is9xjf9Y =b3Rb -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 6:53 AM, Adam Goryachev mailingli...@websitemanagers.com.au wrote: I think the answer to most of this might have been: apt-get --purge remove backuppc This should remove every trace of the package ever having been installed. I only mention this because it might come in handy in the future for you. In addition, you do realise that every distribution of linux can be installed with, or without, the graphical user interface (X Windows + window manager/etc). In fact, you could even install and setup your server with it installed and then un-install it later, or vice-versa Adam, Thanks so much for your helpful message and especially for your forbearance and encouragement. Yes, I do, and I have been playing around over the years with Fedora/CentOS a bit, but have found the learning curve just a bit less steep on the Debian-esque distros and therefore built up a bit more experience there. Since my learning objectives are aimed at BackupPC for now, I wanted to eliminate as many roadblocks as I could. The fact that a post-disaster recovery scenario would most likely involve relatively untrained people was also a factor. If a recovery server could be provided via a customized BackupPC LiveCD, that would greatly improve the resilience and time-to-recover of our DR plan, and (again my perception is) that there is a great variety of user-friendly tools for building LiveCD custom distros in Debian/Ubuntu than Fedora/CentOS. All of which I recognize is down-the-road pie-in-the-sky pipe-dreaming from my current state of knowledge. On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 12:03 AM, Timothy J Massey tmas...@obscorp.com wrote: +1. This was the exact point I was trying to make. As an additional point to the original poster: you said somethng like OK, I'll start over, but with my original config and pool.. NO!!! Start with a 100% clean setup. Make it work, and document EVERY LITTLE THING you do to I just meant I'd keep them when wiping the drive. In the case of the config.pl, for later reference - I'm using diff tools to check against the original, changing one parameter at a time and then testing. Re the cpool, initial experiments start empty with it empty testing against a small test dirstruc, but once I start working again on the real system drive excludes, pre-populating that to save unnecessarily waiting for 18GB back over the wire. On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 12:15 AM, Timothy J Massey tmas...@obscorp.com wrote: So, you understand that each distribution is going to set things up differently, which is very likely to contribute to future problems, yet you decide to voluntarily deal with such problems. All of this after stating that you do not have sufficient skills to even know when you *might* be running into problems. I plan on experimenting with my advanced goals only after the actual backups are working successfully, leaving that setup alone and working with a separate test system. And I do think I have (or am developing) the skills to be able to see when things are going wrong. Such testing is how I like to learn, pushing the envelope of what's possible. You want to dangle a hard drive onto a production server, put BackupPC on that server and consider that a backup? This is wrong on *SO* many levels. It's the wrong configuration, it's the wrong tool and it's serving a purpose that makes almost no sense. Sorry if I wasn't more clear. I didn't mean a production server in the sense of adding BackupPC to a server fullfilling another function, I meant the production BackupPC server, the one actually doing real backups, as opposed to my testing environment. Why would you create a solution such that when one system fails, you risk losing both the production data AND THE BACKUP DATA all at the same time. Imagine a power supply failure. Couldn't it take out both hard drives? Sure can. How about a malicious user that runs rm -rf /. Gonna wipe out the backup data too. I can come up with a DOZEN scenarios with zero effort. I don't understand how you get that, in fact I think the opposite. That would be true if I were relying on RAID, leaving my multiple drives in sync with each other, but in fact the three drives in rotation will each be completely independent instances - here's the link to my original post asking for feedback on that: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.backup.backuppc.general/27289 If a 35% solution works for you, great. But most people would usually prefer a more useful one. Of course if I'm given solid details on why my scheme shouldn't work I won't implement it. Of if I thought it necessary, we could implement this scheme *in addition* to a traditional static instance of BackupPC, but at this point I believe that would only be necessary once sufficient history won't fit on a single large drive. In which case the offsite rotation drives would only hold a more recent subset of that stored on the big RAID array, but
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 12:41 AM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: Re packaging issues, I'm not trying to figure them out at all, AFAIC they're a black box that just works - I plan to just observe their results and stick to their policies (I didn't realize BPC permissions could vary from one distro to another). Thinking of it as a black box only works if you don't plan to make your own changes. The disto packagers modify things to fit programs into the way each distribution works, so don't expect the components to be in the same places, have the same names, owners, permissions, etc. between .deb and .rpm packages. It is up to the packager to make those decisions and they are fairly arbitrary. Re OS choices, I don't have the access, knowledge or desire to do my initial learning/experimentation in the production CentOS CLI environment; for many aspects it's so much easier to work with a distro like Ubuntu at this stage. That makes no sense at all to me. CentOS will install and work just the same as ubuntu unless you have some unusual hardware and if you want a GUI (which won't matter much for what you are doing) you can install it. The only real differences are in the package management tools and administration style and it doesn't make sense to learn/test the wrong one. -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 12:41 AM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: Re packaging issues, I'm not trying to figure them out at all, AFAIC they're a black box that just works - I plan to just observe their results and stick to their policies (I didn't realize BPC permissions could vary from one distro to another). Thinking of it as a black box only works if you don't plan to make your own changes. The disto packagers modify things to fit programs into the way each distribution works, so don't expect the components to be in the same places, have the same names, owners, permissions, etc. between .deb and .rpm packages. It is up to the packager to make those decisions and they are fairly arbitrary. I just meant I didn't want people to waste their time helping me troubleshoot packaging-specific issues. I also don't plan on making changes beyond the symlink/mount redirection to a dedicated TOPDIR drive, which should be transparent. Re OS choices, I don't have the access, knowledge or desire to do my initial learning/experimentation in the production CentOS CLI environment; for many aspects it's so much easier to work with a distro like Ubuntu at this stage. That makes no sense at all to me. CentOS will install and work just the same as ubuntu unless you have some unusual hardware and if you want a GUI snip I meant easier *for me*, simply that I've personally climbed a littler higher up Ubuntu's learning curve, and yes I've found a GUI helpful for certain things - although I'm working with the server edition, I've installed ubuntu-desktop, but am manually bringing it up via startx only when needed. I admit it's a bit of a crutch, and I'm actively working toward learning how to do everything from the text console, as that will of course be my only option once I'm managing BackupPC in production - that environment doesn't have X at all, and in fact I won't have access to the physical console anymore. Thanks for your help Les, and if it isn't out of line I'd like to ask that we end this mega thread, I'm feeling very kreng jai toward the list and don't want to take any more of your collective time. . . -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Timothy J Massey tmas...@obscorp.comwrote: But would probably be a very good idea. What would be an even better idea would be to grab a spare PC (or a virtual guest) and test it from a completely clean installation. And document the *heck* out of what you do: you *will* be doing it again (and again and again). Well the whole thing is a test system, and I'm not that concerned with figuring out what went wrong vs moving forward, so I guess I'll just wipe and restart with a clean OS. Since I want to use the BackupPC 3.1 package (eventual production system will be on CentOS5), while I'm at it I'll use the Ubuntu version it's designed for, Lucid 10.04, rather than the latest Natty 11.04. Hopefully will eliminate the problems I'm seeing un/re- installing from the package system. I plan to keep the pool folders and of course my long-tweaked config.pl, but will start off from the clean install with as close to defaults as possible with a small static target share to test with, then make the changes a little at a time only after I've got the basics working right. Which as you say I should've done from the start. . . In the meantime there are a few unanswered questions in the thread above if anyone has the information to ontribute more detailed responses I'm sure it will help others googling later on. . . -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 2:18 AM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: But would probably be a very good idea. What would be an even better idea would be to grab a spare PC (or a virtual guest) and test it from a completely clean installation. And document the *heck* out of what you do: you *will* be doing it again (and again and again). Well the whole thing is a test system, and I'm not that concerned with figuring out what went wrong vs moving forward, so I guess I'll just wipe and restart with a clean OS. Keep in mind that if you get a virtual machine working, you can just keep the copy at the offsite location. I have a Centos image on my windows laptop under vmware player and can connect the disk with a usb-sata adapter cable. Since I want to use the BackupPC 3.1 package (eventual production system will be on CentOS5), while I'm at it I'll use the Ubuntu version it's designed for, Lucid 10.04, rather than the latest Natty 11.04. If you are going to use centos, you might as well use centos in testing, even if you have to do it under vmware. I think the EPEL package was recently updated to 3.2 and I would be able to give better advice with rpm commands. rpm -q --list backuppc # to see where all the files go rpm -q --scripts # view the install scripts rpm -V backuppc # see what has changed since install etc. I'm sure debian/ubuntu has the equivalent or better, but I don't know them. -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 7:55 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 2:18 AM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: [SNIP] Since I want to use the BackupPC 3.1 package (eventual production system will be on CentOS5), while I'm at it I'll use the Ubuntu version it's designed for, Lucid 10.04, rather than the latest Natty 11.04. If you are going to use centos, you might as well use centos in testing, even if you have to do it under vmware. I think the EPEL package was recently updated to 3.2 and I would be able to give better advice with rpm commands. rpm -q --list backuppc # to see where all the files go rpm -q --scripts # view the install scripts rpm -V backuppc # see what has changed since install etc. I'm sure debian/ubuntu has the equivalent or better, but I don't know them. I just checked and there are builds of 3.2.1 for both EL5 and EL6 but I didn't check if they've made it through to the stable repository. Worst case you can pull them directly from koji[1]. I don't run EL/CentOS/Scientific Linux but I do run Fedora which is more or less equivalent. I used yum to install and the only manual configuration I had to do to get a basic working system was to edit /etc/BackupPC/config.pl to setup the CGI admin user and then setup the password file for apache. That's it. Richard [1] http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=256288 If you don't go through the EL repo then you'll also need to pay attention to the changelog as there are two new perl modules you need to install separately. (perl(Net::FTP::AutoReconnect) and perl(Net::FTP::RetrHandle)). -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
Hi, Les Mikesell wrote on 2011-09-02 16:46:34 -0500 [Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes]: On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 4:38 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: Or is the message link host-name in my log when running _dump -v manually indicate a hardlinkng problem kicking in **after** the pc filesystem's already been created? I think the fact that the link step isn't completing is your real problem, but I still don't know why. If you get that far it should work or tell you why in the logs. just in case this hasn't been cleared up somewhere else in this huge thread: the link host-name message is simply BackupPC_dump's way of telling the BackupPC daemon that BackupPC_link needs to be run for host-name, nothing more. Normally, the daemon starts BackupPC_dump and reads its stdout. If you run BackupPC_dump manually, the message just pops up on your terminal without effect. Just ignore it. Regards, Holger -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
Hi, hans...@gmail.com wrote on 2011-09-03 05:03:30 +0700 [Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes]: On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 4:38 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote: In general, backuppc needs rw permission on everything, and apache (www-data on debian/ubuntu) needs read access to some of it. Sorry to need such hand-holding, I was thinking hand-cuffing. How about *solving* one issue before creating a dozen new ones in the attempt? but if I'm above my TOPDIR and execute chown -R backuppc TOPDIR chgrp -R www-data TOPDIR chmod 644 TOPDIR should that be OK? No. Should I run the start/stop with su backuppc instead? You hopefully won't be able to. Means: no. Regards, Holger -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
Hi, Les Mikesell wrote on 2011-09-03 07:55:29 -0500 [Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes]: On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 2:18 AM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: Keep in mind that if you get a virtual machine working, [...] and before keeping that in mind, keep in mind to get your system working before raising other issues. Since I want to use the BackupPC 3.1 package (eventual production system will be on CentOS5), while I'm at it I'll use the Ubuntu version it's designed for, Lucid 10.04, rather than the latest Natty 11.04. If you are going to use centos, you might as well use centos in testing, I need to agree with that. You might be hunting down a packaging issue you will never have on the system you are intending to use. On the other hand, you may be missing other packaging issues that you *will* have (not meaning to say there are any bugs in the rpm, just that things can go wrong). So what's the point of testing the installation process if you are going to use a completely different one? I think the EPEL package was recently updated to 3.2 Which may or may not be an advantage. I'm still running BackupPC 2.1.2, and it does exactly what it is supposed to do. The 3.2 package may be better or worse than the 3.1 package. No idea. But, again, you should test what you intend to do later, not something possibly similar. If you plan on using 3.2, then test with that. and I would be able to give better advice with rpm commands. Just as much as I would be able to give better advice with dpkg/apt commands :). I'll get back to that if there is any point. Regards, Holger P.S.: On the bind-mount issue, first of all I agree with the points that have been made on eliminating complexity as long as things are not working for you. Once you know how to *reproducibly* get things running (which *should be* as trivial as installing the package and setting up the necessary configuration, but obviously something is going wrong somewhere), you can move on to the issue of data pool storage. I maintain that bind mounts are absolutely fine to use. They are not the *source* of your problem, though in the process of using them you might have messed something up. They *certainly* will *never* replace soft links, because they don't address the same issue (much like scissors haven't replaced knives). If you ask for my guess, either the package is incorrectly setting things up, or you have somehow messed up your system to a point that the package installation runs incorrectly, or you have incorrectly described what is happening. I can understand that you may be leaving things out that seem unimportant to you. Let's just hope you're right :). -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
Hi, hans...@gmail.com wrote on 2011-09-03 02:10:55 +0700 [Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes]: [...] I haven't been able to find in the docs a listing of what the permissions are supposed to be, and as a *nix noob, I may very well have screwed things up in that area messing around. I believe I set everything from TOPDIR down as owned by user backuppc and group www-data. I'd appreciate a pointer to how it's supposed to be, and in the meantime will try a complete uninstall and re-install (moving my conf and pool data elsewhere first) and see how that goes. . . just to try to (finally) give a definite answer to this question: It depends on what policies your BackupPC package has implemented! Personally, I'd find a choice of group www-data ***stupid***, because it gives *any web application* running on the server access to your pool data - possibly including any amount of confidential information. There's a reason for running the BackupPC_admin CGI setuid, and that's precisely avoiding this mistake. The BackupPC CGI interface needs access to the pool, the rest of the web server should *not* be allowed to access it in any way. The Debian packages I know use a private group also name 'backuppc' and permissions g=u,g-w (meaning same as user, but without write permission) and no access for others. Actually, these permissions would allow using a different user for the CGI interface, who can browse the backups but has no write access to the data (though I believe that is not actually done). Concerning anything BackupPC creates itself, if that is not automatically created with correct permissions, you've got a problem anyway. You should *never* need to change permissions or ownership on anything below $TopDir. If you're copying something, copy it correctly. Unless you know *exactly* what you are doing, the permissions (and ownership, and timestamps) are just as much part of the information as the data or the file names. While it's true that you *can* presumably fix things you broke regarding permissions, while you likely *cannot* fix errors in the data, prefer avoiding breaking things in the first place. These points are not specific to BackupPC, they apply as much with any other software's data files. The only thing, I believe, BackupPC will *not* automatically create is $TopDir itself. Again, your package is authoritative on what the permissions should be, and if it gets this wrong, that's a bug. *For sanity checking only*, $TopDir should be writeable for the user BackupPC is running as (i.e. backuppc), readable and searchable for the CGI user (usually also backuppc, but could, in principle, differ) and not accessible for others. Ownership and group may be set up in a number of ways to achieve this, subject to the implementation the package creator has chosen. *Presuming the package creates all needed subdirectories under $TopDir and gives them the correct permissions*, and only then, $TopDir might be left *not* writeable for the BackupPC user, though I'm not sure what the point in this would be. Apparently, but this is only a wild guess, the Ubuntu package chooses the latter option, but incorrectly determines when and how to create the subdirectories (seems to skip this on reinstallation, even though they don't exist or have wrong permissions). If this is true, it is a bug in the Ubuntu package and should be reported to the appropriate BTS. Assuming you still want to proceed with the Ubuntu package, it *might* help to *purge* the package (dpkg --purge backuppc) before re-installing it, but it really depends on *how* the package comes up with the idea that it was previously installed. Again, you probably shouldn't be testing with Ubuntu if you are interested in the CentOS installation procedure. Regards, Holger -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
hans...@gmail.com wrote at about 14:18:41 +0700 on Saturday, September 3, 2011: On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Timothy J Massey tmas...@obscorp.comwrote: But would probably be a very good idea. What would be an even better idea would be to grab a spare PC (or a virtual guest) and test it from a completely clean installation. And document the *heck* out of what you do: you *will* be doing it again (and again and again). Well the whole thing is a test system, and I'm not that concerned with figuring out what went wrong vs moving forward, so I guess I'll just wipe and restart with a clean OS. Since I want to use the BackupPC 3.1 package (eventual production system will be on CentOS5), while I'm at it I'll use the Ubuntu version it's designed for, Lucid 10.04, rather than the latest Natty 11.04. Hopefully will eliminate the problems I'm seeing un/re- installing from the package system. I plan to keep the pool folders and of course my long-tweaked config.pl, but will start off from the clean install with as close to defaults as possible with a small static target share to test with, then make the changes a little at a time only after I've got the basics working right. Which as you say I should've done from the start. . . In the meantime there are a few unanswered questions in the thread above if anyone has the information to ontribute more detailed responses I'm sure it will help others googling later on. . . Just a piece of friendly advice... you seem to have posted dozens of posts in the past 24 hours or so... you keep making multiple, often non-standard or nonsensical changes to a standard configuration... and are asking multiple questions as you dig yourself deeper. Why don't you pursue this in a rational and organized approach? Get the basic system working with no modifications. Verify that it works, play with it, and get comfortable with the default setup and behaviors. Then step-by-step make one change at a time. If the change works as expected, then move on to the next change. If it doesn't then you know the exact source of the problem and can either troubleshoot it yourself (ideal) or ask a specific question to the list. What you are doing now is confusing yourself and probably most of the readers of the list. Pretty soon people will get tired of answering you or will lose track of all the questions and changes you have made meaning that they won't be around to help you when you really need it. Thanks -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Jeffrey J. Kosowsky backu...@kosowsky.orgwrote: Just a piece of friendly advice... you seem to have posted dozens of posts in the past 24 hours or so... you keep making multiple, often non-standard or nonsensical changes to a standard configuration... and are asking multiple questions as you dig yourself deeper. Thanks very Jeffrey, and to everyone, both for specific answers to my questions and for your valuable general advice and feedback. About my messing things up by my lack of *nix knowledge and making things too complicated, you're completely right and I apologize for wasting your time with my scattered approach to the learning curve. Re packaging issues, I'm not trying to figure them out at all, AFAIC they're a black box that just works - I plan to just observe their results and stick to their policies (I didn't realize BPC permissions could vary from one distro to another). If necessary, I will now be able to just roll back to a virgin state via CloneZilla, rather than un-installing. Re OS choices, I don't have the access, knowledge or desire to do my initial learning/experimentation in the production CentOS CLI environment; for many aspects it's so much easier to work with a distro like Ubuntu at this stage. Once I'm confident I've got the BPC side of things working just right, the CentOS guy can set up the production server however he likes. My ultimate goal is to have a self-contained BackupPC HDD - conf and log physically under TOPDIR - which in the event of a disaster can be mounted to a new host running an arbitrary distro, possibly needing to be created by a staffer even more ignorant of Linux than myself supported by a step-by-step howto. Ideally I'd like to figure out how to create a customized BackupPC LiveCD that could be stored with the drive(s) offsite. These goals also support my doing the learning/configuration work on an alternative distro. But for now, I am starting from scratch with 3.1 on Lucid, working step by step in departing from the defaults, testing and keeping careful notes in case I need to come back here with further issues, so as not to waste you guys' time further. Thanks again for your help. -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
[BackupPC-users] first full never completes
Running 3.1.0, installed via synaptic on Ubuntu 11.04. After spending a lot of time refining my excludes, thinking windows open files were preventing a successful full backup completing, I tried making the whole target one very small and static directory tree with the same result. There isn't anything indicating a problem in the logs, other than Backup aborted at the end, just before the saved as a partial backup message and after DeltaGet phase 0 and phase 1. I've enabled rsync's log but it just lists the files, no errors. Similar results when running the _dump script manually. Any ideas? Happy to provide further details if it helps track things down, I suspect everything's actually backing up, but would like to get the dot on the i from the status page. Another issue, I'm sure unrelated, is that I can only access the /backuppc web admin interface from the BPC server's console (as localhost), not over the network - I confirmed that the apache.conf contents were included in the global conf. Thanks in advance. . . -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
I just ran the _dump script manually again, this time fully deleting everything under TOPDIR except the pool directories and with the -v verbose option. The ending of the process was the same, except for a link host_name just before the end aborted message. I'm thinking maybe a permissions issue? I haven't been able to find in the docs a listing of what the permissions are supposed to be, and as a *nix noob, I may very well have screwed things up in that area messing around. I believe I set everything from TOPDIR down as owned by user backuppc and group www-data. I'd appreciate a pointer to how it's supposed to be, and in the meantime will try a complete uninstall and re-install (moving my conf and pool data elsewhere first) and see how that goes. . . Running 3.1.0, installed via synaptic on Ubuntu 11.04. After spending a lot of time refining my excludes, thinking windows open files were preventing a successful full backup completing, I tried making the whole target one very small and static directory tree with the same result. There isn't anything indicating a problem in the logs, other than Backup aborted at the end, just before the saved as a partial backup message and after DeltaGet phase 0 and phase 1. I've enabled rsync's log but it just lists the files, no errors. Similar results when running the _dump script manually. Any ideas? Happy to provide further details if it helps track things down, I suspect everything's actually backing up, but would like to get the dot on the i from the status page. Another issue, I'm sure unrelated, is that I can only access the /backuppc web admin interface from the BPC server's console (as localhost), not over the network - I confirmed that the apache.conf contents were included in the global conf. Thanks in advance. . . -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 2:10 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: I just ran the _dump script manually again, this time fully deleting everything under TOPDIR except the pool directories and with the -v verbose option. The ending of the process was the same, except for a link host_name just before the end aborted message. I'm thinking maybe a permissions issue? I haven't been able to find in the docs a listing of what the permissions are supposed to be, and as a *nix noob, I may very well have screwed things up in that area messing around. I believe I set everything from TOPDIR down as owned by user backuppc and group www-data. The ubuntu package should have set everything up correctly. You didn't change TOPDIR or mount something underneath it after the install, did you? -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 2:23 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote: The ubuntu package should have set everything up correctly. You didn't change TOPDIR or mount something underneath it after the install, did you? -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com 8-) Of course I did Les, precisely as outlined in the post crossed in the mail just now. I don't have anything else under the TOPDIR, other than keeping a few of my own scripts in the conf directory. A related factor as I mentioned, I've been wiping and starting over with different levels of log verbosity while troubleshooting, letting BPC re-create the logs and pc folders, leaving the pools in place so all the stuff doesn't actually have to be transfered over the wire all over again. I monitor the process with two watch consoles, one doing a du on the pc folder, the other filtering lsof for the backuppc user, and a CPU activity monitor showing rsync kicking off on the win client, and everything goes through just fine, for a while (while I was tweaking all my excludes on the system drive) it was filling in some of the previously uncaptured files but the last half-dozen runs have come in with the same filecount and du size every time. It just never actually says the full was completed. -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 2:47 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: The ubuntu package should have set everything up correctly. You didn't change TOPDIR or mount something underneath it after the install, did you? Of course I did Les, precisely as outlined in the post crossed in the mail just now. I don't see any other message yet, but the way to get it right is to just mount the partition you want to use for storage in the place where backuppc wants it (should be /var/lib/backuppc with the deb package). Or put a symlink there pointing to the location you want. If you do this before the install, everything should land in the right place and get the right permissions. The critical things are that the pool/cpool/pc directories must all be in the same filesystem so hardlinks can work and with versions before 3.2 you can't change the TOPDIR location after the initial setup which is already done in the deb and rpm packaged versions. Usually if you get these wrong, you get an error when starting the service about not being able to make a hard link so I'm not quite sure what is happening. -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 3:14 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote: I don't see any other message yet, but the way to get it right is to just mount the partition you want to use for storage in the place where backuppc wants it (should be /var/lib/backuppc with the deb package). Or put a symlink there pointing to the location you want. If you do this before the install, everything should land in the right place and get the right permissions. The critical things are that the pool/cpool/pc directories must all be in the same filesystem so hardlinks can work and with versions before 3.2 you can't change the TOPDIR location after the initial setup which is already done in the deb and rpm packaged versions. Usually if you get these wrong, you get an error when starting the service about not being able to make a hard link so I'm not quite sure what is happening I meant that I'd done exactly as you suggested above, but with bind mounts rather than symlinks, with the specific locations and steps as outlined in this post http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=CAOAgVpwU13YitOFF%2BNSXH3rYJVUNu%2B2KjpGqt2STL6sVgpdQ1g%40mail.gmail.comforum_name=backuppc-users which you've also responded to. Sorry to have multiple threads going at the same time, but obviously they may be more related than I thought. I've just uninstalled the backuppc package, then either manually deleted or verified these were removed: /etc/backuppc /usr/share/backuppc /var/lib/backuppc and rebooted. Re-installed, this time without anything extra in the fstab, just letting the package go where it wants, but in the end of the post-install script, get a message that the hard-link test failed. Did I miss something in uninstalling that may have interfered with the re-install? Could I please get a pointer to what the permissions should be on these locations and their contents? That's actually what I was trying to get by going through the installation again. . . Thanks much for your help. . . -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 3:32 AM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: If you do this before the install, everything should land in the right place and get the right permissions. The critical things are that the pool/cpool/pc directories must all be in the same filesystem so hardlinks can work Just to confirm yes these are all in the same filesystem - in fact the whole testing install is in one ext3 partition. And I'm thinking of running through the install again, this time as you suggest with my desired mounts in place rather than moving them after the fact. But that leads me to still want to know what permissions (chmod/chown/chgrp) should be on the mount points and/or their targets? You can tell I'm not fully ofay on this *nix stuff just yet. . . And if I want to wipe the log and pc folders between test runs, should I recreate the empty folders and then reset permissions, or just let BackupPC do it - which I assume it would do correctly? -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 3:32 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: Re-installed, this time without anything extra in the fstab, just letting the package go where it wants, but in the end of the post-install script, get a message that the hard-link test failed. Did I miss something in uninstalling that may have interfered with the re-install? Could I please get a pointer to what the permissions should be on these locations and their contents? That's actually what I was trying to get by going through the installation again. . . The ubuntu package should create a backuppc user and that should be the owner of everything under TOPDIR. I think you need to diagnose why the link fails but trying the same operation from the shell (su -s /bin/bash backuppc if it doesn't have a shell configure for login). I think you are making things too complicate with a bunch of bind mounts. Why not just mount the partition as /var/lib/backuppc and if you want it to be self-contained, symlink other stuff there? -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 3:50 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote: The ubuntu package should create a backuppc user and that should be the owner of everything under TOPDIR. I think you need to diagnose why the link fails but trying the same operation from the shell (su -s /bin/bash backuppc if it doesn't have a shell configure for login). What is the same operation? I'm not up on how to track down the postinstall script in the install package, is it just doing an /etc/init.d/backuppc start? I think you are making things too complicate with a bunch of bind mounts. Why not just mount the partition as /var/lib/backuppc and if you want it to be self-contained, symlink other stuff there? The references I've seen, both here in the list and elsewhere - hang on a sec - yes right in the BPC docs http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/backuppc/index.php?title=Change_archive_directory#Bind-mounting_TopDir treat them as functionally equivalent. Personally I don't see how bind mounts are any more complex than symlinks; my impression is that as developers are able to count on modern systems' handling bind mounts, symlinks are getting deprecated. They also seem less vulnerable somehow, I've heard of some software/systems being unable to traverse them - in fact I've read they're pretty much transparent right down to the kernel level. If you're saying symlinks are to be preferred over bind mounts then I'd be happy to switch, but would like to know why, and perhaps the FAQ ref'd above should include those points. . . In the meantime, my reinstall without ANY filesystem shenanigans didn't pass the hardlinks test on startup. Any ideas as to what could be the cause of that? Maybe because backuppc user already exists? Should I be logged in as her when re-installing? -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
Sorry, editing mangled the referents of my pronouns: I've heard of some software/systems being unable to traverse them [SYMLINKS] - in fact I've read they're [BIND MOUNTS] pretty much transparent right down to the kernel level. -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 3:50 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote: The ubuntu package should create a backuppc user and that should be the owner of everything under TOPDIR. I think you need to diagnose why the link fails but trying the same operation from the shell (su -s /bin/bash backuppc if it doesn't have a shell configure for login). OK, I wiped and re-installed again. The four empty folders under TOPDIR are all root root, I chown'd to backuppc and chgrp'd to www-data and the init start worked fine. Now I'm just guessing that if I need to reset permissions in the future I should do the same with -R - is that true for conf and log as well? I haven't found anything on what these permissions should be and would appreciate any pointers if the knowledge exists out there. . . In the past I was running the init start/stop via sudo - would that mess things up? I was chastised about using sudo when shell'd in as backuppc before, so I've been mostly working from the sysadmin account created installing the OS, since backuppc's rights are so restricted. . . Thanks again for your ongoing help and patience with my learning curve. . . -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 4:10 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: The ubuntu package should create a backuppc user and that should be the owner of everything under TOPDIR. I think you need to diagnose why the link fails but trying the same operation from the shell (su -s /bin/bash backuppc if it doesn't have a shell configure for login). What is the same operation? I'm not up on how to track down the postinstall script in the install package, is it just doing an /etc/init.d/backuppc start? I mean try to create a hardlink between a file under the pc directory to under the cpool directory. su -s /bin/bash backuppc cd /var/lib/backuppc/pc touch testfile ln testfile ../cpool/testfile that should complete with no errors and then ls -l testfile should show a link count of 2. Backuppc does approximately the same test at startup but in perl and you may not see the real error message. Does the drive in question have a filesystem that handles hard links? -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 4:24 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: OK, I wiped and re-installed again. The four empty folders under TOPDIR are all root root, I chown'd to backuppc and chgrp'd to www-data and the init start worked fine. Now I'm just guessing that if I need to reset permissions in the future I should do the same with -R - is that true for conf and log as well? I haven't found anything on what these permissions should be and would appreciate any pointers if the knowledge exists out there. . . In general, backuppc needs rw permission on everything, and apache (www-data on debian/ubuntu) needs read access to some of it. -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 4:38 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: Or is the message link host-name in my log when running _dump -v manually indicate a hardlinkng problem kicking in **after** the pc filesystem's already been created? I think the fact that the link step isn't completing is your real problem, but I still don't know why. If you get that far it should work or tell you why in the logs. -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 4:38 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote: In general, backuppc needs rw permission on everything, and apache (www-data on debian/ubuntu) needs read access to some of it. Sorry to need such hand-holding, but if I'm above my TOPDIR and execute chown -R backuppc TOPDIR chgrp -R www-data TOPDIR chmod 644 TOPDIR should that be OK? Anyone with suggestions for improvement would be most welcome And what if my CONF and LOG folders are included there as well? The above is what I was doing when resetting log and pc during my testing. Should I recreate the empty folders and then reset permissions, or just let BackupPC do it - which I assume it would do correctly? Does the message link host-name in my log when running _dump -v manually indicate a hardlinkng problem kicking in **after** the pc filesystem's already been created? In the past I was running the init start/stop via sudo - would that have messed things up? Should I run the start/stop with su backuppc instead? I've now tried to uninstall/re-install twice times without success. Apparently the failure of the hardlink test during the postinstall also prevented the creation of the default config.pl and hosts files. This time I'm planning to delete the backuppc user as well as: /var/lib/backuppc /etc/backuppc /var/log/backuppc /usr/share/backuppc I'm not going to do anything different with the filesystem until I get the default install working first, but I'd really rather not have to re-install the server platform OS itself. . . is there **anything** else I should do to ensure a clean system state before re-installing BackupPC? -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 4:46 AM, Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 4:38 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: Or is the message link host-name in my log when running _dump -v manually indicate a hardlinkng problem kicking in **after** the pc filesystem's already been created? I think the fact that the link step isn't completing is your real problem, but I still don't know why. If you get that far it should work or tell you why in the logs. Sorry our posts crossed. By link step do you mean another stage that was supposed to happen after: DeltaGet phase 0 and phase 1. ? I tried setting the verbosity level to 99, then 3 and 2 and never got any wheat I could understand out of that chaff. the link host-name message only came from the manual _dump -v run, never (as far as I can recall) showed up in the backups initiated via the web host. By the way I just remembered I disabled nightly by renaming it .disabled, and set backups to not run automatically while I was doing my testing (the docs didn't mention setting it to zero, could that be the problem - what's the official way to accomplish those two things? -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 5:03 AM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: This time I'm planning to delete the backuppc user Is anything more than removing the line from /etc/passwd required for this? as well as: /var/lib/backuppc /etc/backuppc /var/log/backuppc /usr/share/backuppc I'm not going to do anything different with the filesystem until I get the default install working first, but I'd really rather not have to re-install the server platform OS itself. . . is there **anything** else I should do to ensure a clean system state before re-installing BackupPC? -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Sat, Sep 3, 2011 at 5:03 AM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: This time I'm planning to delete the backuppc user Is anything more than removing the line from /etc/passwd required for this? as well as: /var/lib/backuppc /etc/backuppc /var/log/backuppc /usr/share/backuppc I'm not going to do anything different with the filesystem until I get the default install working first, but I'd really rather not have to re-install the server platform OS itself. . . is there **anything** else I should do to ensure a clean system state before re-installing BackupPC? Somehow the package installer sees that there **used to be** a config.pl in the (non-existing when it started) /etc/backuppc folder and therefore doesn't install it, nor hosts. Bringing them in from my zip'd archive AND doing the chown/chgroup -R on TOPDIR allows the init start to work, but the web admin interface won't load, even though the backuppc conf is in place under apache's init folder. Before I wipe the whole drive and start over, is there a relatively recent howto on manual installing on Debian/Ubuntu, or could someone help me manually eliminate *ALL* traces of my previous BPC install so the package-based routines will 100% complete as designed for a virgin system? In the meantime it's 5:30am here and my two toddlers will be waking me up in an hour or so so I'm grabbing some shuteye. I expect perfect answers to all my questions here when I return! (just kidding 8-) Thanks for your help so far Les, and in advance to anyone else willing to chime in. . . -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
Quick reply (on iPad): I have used symlink for most of a decade now with zero issues on a dozen severs. Timothy J. Massey Out of the Box Solutions Inc. Sent from my iPad On Sep 2, 2011, at 5:09 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: Sorry, editing mangled the referents of my pronouns: I've heard of some software/systems being unable to traverse them [SYMLINKS] - in fact I've read they're [BIND MOUNTS] pretty much transparent right down to the kernel level. -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:03 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: In the past I was running the init start/stop via sudo - would that have messed things up? Should I run the start/stop with su backuppc instead? I don't use debian/ubuntu that much. On a RedHat/Centos system you run the init scripts as root (usually via the 'service' command) to start and stop things and the scripts or programs take care of setting the right user id themselves. I've now tried to uninstall/re-install twice times without success. Apparently the failure of the hardlink test during the postinstall also prevented the creation of the default config.pl and hosts files. This time I'm planning to delete the backuppc user as well as: /var/lib/backuppc /etc/backuppc /var/log/backuppc /usr/share/backuppc None of that should be necessary. The only thing I can think is that you manually created something as root and left it so backuppc couldn't write what it needed, or your mounts aren't really where you think. Or if you installed, then copied the installed files to a new place you didn't use 'cp -a' to preserve ownership and permissions. is there **anything** else I should do to ensure a clean system state before re-installing BackupPC? On a RH/Centos system you could 'rpm -V backuppc' and it would display any change in files, ownership, or permissions in the current system from what the package installed. I'd expect a similar function with debs but don't know enough to help you with it. -- Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev ___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Re: [BackupPC-users] first full never completes
Les Mikesell lesmikes...@gmail.com wrote on 09/02/2011 11:05:22 PM: On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 5:03 PM, hans...@gmail.com wrote: I've now tried to uninstall/re-install twice times without success. Apparently the failure of the hardlink test during the postinstall also prevented the creation of the default config.pl and hosts files. This time I'm planning to delete the backuppc user as well as: /var/lib/backuppc /etc/backuppc /var/log/backuppc /usr/share/backuppc None of that should be necessary. But would probably be a very good idea. What would be an even better idea would be to grab a spare PC (or a virtual guest) and test it from a completely clean installation. And document the *heck* out of what you do: you *will* be doing it again (and again and again). The only thing I can think is that you manually created something as root and left it so backuppc couldn't write what it needed, or your mounts aren't really where you think. I would encourage you to simply use a symlink. That should simplify things. Or even better: *don't* use a symlink. Create a test system that has only a single partition and get things working with just a small amount of data. Once you can set up a server that can successfully back up, say, 1GB of data, then you know what works. Then make a single change at a time (e.g. reinstall, but using a symlink to a data partition) and see if it works. If it does, great. If not, you know what you did wrong! Or if you installed, then copied the installed files to a new place you didn't use 'cp -a' to preserve ownership and permissions. And while there are a million reasons why you might *think* that is a a good idea (copying/moving the files to a new place), it is an absolutely *TERRIBLE* idea until you have at *least* built a working configuration without doing so. (Even afterwards, it's probably a terrible idea, but at least then you'll know conclusively that it is the source of your problems or not.) That spare PC used to set up a *VERY* straightforward system is getting more and more important... :) is there **anything** else I should do to ensure a clean system state before re-installing BackupPC? Not to beat a dead horse (which is just a way of saying that I'm *gonna* beat a dead horse), but I would leave your current system alone and work on that pristine system on a spare PC (or VM guest)... Once you know what works, you can compare it to the system that doesn't. And as an aside for the hordes that are hanging on my every word (right? :) ), that's *always* a good plan: start with a machine that you can reformat and reinstall from scratch--over and over and over again--when you try to do something like implement a new software package... And once you have it working the way you think you want it to work, take *another* spare system (or guest VM) from scratch and use your copious and detailed documentation (which you have, right?) to re-create the solution as cleanly and straightforwardly as possible, updating the documentation so that you have a 100% correlati0n between your documentation and your solution. For a computer consultant like myself, who is always planning on being able to reproduce *any* solution for another customer, such a procedure is automatic--and incredibly valuable. Sorry if this seems like preaching or condesending. I'm not trying to; it seems like you might benefit from such a strategy. Timothy J. Massey Out of the Box Solutions, Inc. Creative IT Solutions Made Simple! http://www.OutOfTheBoxSolutions.com tmas...@obscorp.com 22108 Harper Ave. St. Clair Shores, MI 48080 Office: (800)750-4OBS (4627) Cell: (586)945-8796 -- Special Offer -- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE! Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free! And you'll get a free Love Thy Logs t-shirt when you download Logger. Secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY! http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsisghtdev2dev___ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List:https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki:http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
