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Ask Slashdot: Heterogeneous Network Backups w/Linux?
drix asks:
"Like many I'm running a Linux gateway between my
home network and cable internet connection. Naturally, I'd
like it if my Linux server, 4 Win 98 boxes, and
iMac could do a nightly backup. The problem is I only have
one tape drive, which is, of course, situated in the
server. So my question is what software exists that, a)
runs on Linux, b) exists in a client server form, where
the server runs a "backup daemon" that each client
connects to to backup its respective hard disk each night,
and c) has clients available for Windows and optionally
Mac? I guess the analogous NT ware would be Seagate
Backup Exec, which runs on an NT server and polls NT
workstations nightly for any changed files, and then uses
delta file compression to zip those changes to the server's
tape drive. I don't need anything that complicated, but I
must have the basic ability to move the files."
I think they should have a linux server daemon by now... they have clients for most major OS's
You want AMANDA.. I know they have winNT clients.. not sure about ther other OS's. But you should be able to find a workaround for them.hm.. maybe goota start with writing a good fatfs-dump
http://www.knox-software.com/
I've restored a crashed disc that was DOS/Linux for my boss.
The restorable way is to tarball the home directory into an 8.3 filename, copy to a mounted DOS disc, copy the whole mess to the pooter with the tape drive, and back up there.
It blows chunks, but the best backup software is still Arcada for Windoze.
Monster drives are cheap, just copy your stuff to it over SAMBA and let Arcada back it up. Nasty, but restoreable.
Backup/Restore software is dependent on user interface. Linux software doesn't have one, yet.
You can run Samba and use it to talk to your Windows boxes, and pull files that way. You can build Appletalk into the kernel; there are probably docs on how to use it somewhere in /usr/src/linux/Documentation.
If you can't get Appletalk to work, you can always get Dave for the Mac, which will let it talk to the Windows and Linux machines via SMB (Samba under Linux, Network Neighborhood under Windows).
Good luck...
I've been trying to figure out the same thing. I figure I've got about 9GB of stuff, and with compression that should fit nicely on about 10 disks... plus one or two for incremental backups so that I don't have to do the whole very often.
That makes my total media cost about $30 at today's prices for CD-RW disks. (or $12 for CDR if I don't feel like ever re-writing anything)
So how is this not as good as tape???
But I'm still trying to get my IDE CD-RW to even work under Linux...
hitchhiker
I use power quest drive image extensively (shameless plug, it rocks). But hey I would like an OS agnostic solution for imaging the entire disk over a network.
How about
Would this work? what would be a good implementation of compression and net access?
My goal would be able to image an entire disk regardless of OS as long as the Nix on a Floppy could boot, (also restoring of the image to disk of course)
just another idea, you can have it free, I got tons
Amanda is extremely good. :), but once it's
A real pain to configure
working it's painless and very admin friendly.
Basically you tell it how often you want a guaranteed backup of your system, how big the tapes are and how often you want to change them.
It does it's best to sort out the rest.
We use it to backup a mix of about 5 different Unix's and NT boxes and (unlike previous commercial packages we used) it works.
Can't you just use "tar -czvf myarchive0000.tgz --multi-volume --tape-length=640000 --same-owner /" and then burn each file to a cd?
Just a guess
Also, didn't he say.. I don't have to reboot my Win98/Linux box every now and then.
ADSM is an awesome backup system. the server code runs on NT or solaris, but it has client software for all platforms including linux. It's an IBM product.
gack. talk about punching a hole in your network.
that's the only real objection I have to backup via SMB, though.
Search around the net for some of the on-line backup services offered nowadays. They're pretty reasonable and guarentee that your data is encrypted and stored in a fireproof safe. For personal backups, I hear they're in the $20-30/mo range.
> pipe the whole thing over the network to the image server **how?** It couldn't save it to disk as file
/my/install/root.dump | restore xf -
> (no file system on the floppy) Would mounting NFS be practical? Is there a lightweight stream
> oriented file transport? tftp? fsp? netcat?
Umm, how about rsh/ssh? They work fine for such things.
I've piped the archive output of BRU2000 over a network using ssh with no trouble (after I figured out to use dd on the remote end to write it all to the tape drive, otherwise I end up with variable-sized blocks).
rsh/dump was what IBM used in the installation program of AOS (BSD 4.3 for the RT risc box). Basically just
rsh -l root installserver cat
Just substitute dd for the backup program...
You're right that netcat can be used for the same thing.
I agree 100%. You definitely don't want critical data on a "client" machine. The Linux box should have a lot of disk space and export filesystems via Samba and Netatalk. Data backup and even more important, restoration will be much easier this way.
I think that smbtar is exactly what you are looking for. The man page description says it all: smbtar - shell script for backing up SMB shares directly to UNIX tape drive.
If you take the route of Samba, how can you backup
the so-crucial registry files of Windows?
The plain files cannot be read. Special API functions
are provided that allow the reading of those
files.
Of course, restoring a registry from a backup
would be an amazingly scary thing to do, anyway...
CD Backup, which is based on Backburner, are both good and rapidly developing solutions to the linux CD-R and CD-RW backup questions. Furthermore, they can be used to archive mounted partitions which addresses the original question of how to backup multiple OS's.
A number of people suggest here mounting your iMac's hard drive over AppleShare with netatalk. If you do:
1) Consider having the iMac mount a linux appletalk share instead. Linux can provide the share using AppleShareIP, which is much much much faster. The AppleShareIP client for your Mac is a free download. You can't do the reverse (share your iMac via AppleShareIP) unless you install the expensive AppleShareIP server. Write an AppleScript or MacPerl script to do the mounting, copying, and dismounting for you. There are free Mount AppleShare IP AppleScript osaxen on scriptweb. Then get a Macintosh copy of cron (there's a good 64K one, crond? shareware?) to run the script.
2) No matter what scheme you choose, some of your apps will not be restorable just by copying back the files. The MacOS uses numbers, not paths to refer to files. It uses those funky paths you see in the Get Info... to ask the OS for the numbers (like ":::Applications:PlayerPro:Plug-ins:")That's why you can move the Operating System to another directory and not get any errors (except for the stupid aliases in the Apple Menu). But some apps try to record these numbers into preferences or resources (though Apple warns not to), so if you restore the file from another drive the file number will change and the app's paths are broken. A programmer can do this to build crude copy protection into a Mac program. If the user tries to pirate an app by copying it to another Mac's drives, the app will break as file number N is not the same file on the new drive as it was on the old one. Quark is like this; so are most Microsoft products, as was the LaserWriter driver for a while (until Apple finally fixed it). If you copied them from Mac to Mac, they'd break with a (you guessed it) File Not Found error. I bet if you copy them to a netatalk share on linux and back, you'd get similarly problematic results.
If you're good with ResEdit, you can figure out where the file numbers are stored and delete them, which usually cause the app to try to rebuild the path and get a new number. Just be aware some of your apps might be unrestorable without a re-install or hacking the Resource fork.
And you guys thought linux had nifty guts...
Use apples disk copy thing to back up yer mac. Mount a appletalk share of your linux box, mac a disk image of the hard disk (use create image from folder, not create image from disk. then you can make it compressed-readonly) and save it to your share. I back up my mac to zip like this. Never any problems. totally restorable and FREE
I'm not choosy about the tape backup software, but a while back (before I got into Linux in a big way) I bought an iomega Ditto 2GB backup tape drive to backup my Windows PC. This device runs off the parallel port. Is there any Linux support for this?
It has clients for AIX,HPUX,SUNOS,LINUX,SCO,IRIX,SOLARIS,SOLARIS X86,windows 95/98/3.1/NT/2000,Mac,you name it
I suggest that you take a look at http:\\www.harborsys.com the HARBOR product line backs up everything from NT, Mac, Win9x, VMS, NetWare, databases, all the Unixes you could imagine and more. There is even a yet to be released client for Linux (tested under Redhat), but the BSD client is available. All the HARBOR products use a CRON like scheduler with the standard CRONTAB file if CRON is not available natively, so this will be very familar to most out there. The standard HARBOR host is based on MVS but the new Network Storage Manager (NSM) is being released right now and it is based on NT with a Unix version in the works. NSM media server can use SCSI tape, RAID, SAN, Fibre channel, SCSI channel, ESCON, ethernet or token-ring networks (or any combination). The client can be controlled from the NSM host independant of the host or network technology. You can even upgrade the client from the host at will. HARBOR also has a platform independant scripting host called Distribution Manager (DM) which can practically package and distribute kitchen sinks across the network.
There is a remote backup company called Offsite data which does network, intranet and internet backups strictly with the HARBOR product. There were mentions in the discussion here about Legato, Veritas and ADSM. I would suggest that HARBOR is much more diverse and stable system than anything else out there.
The aggregate throughput for the Exabyte 210 with the best mammoth drive and compression with your 200GB backup would take a grand total of 9.5 hours without any factoring for compression, network traffic, tape swapping, indexing and a whole range of other factors. So how in the heck do you achieve this. Quite frankly I think this another Slashdot bogus hero story. The best backup I know of in this range was achieved with parallel streamed backup over ESCON (17MB/s Channel to Channel) from storage arrays to DASD. But even here there is drive latency factors, VTAM tuning issues, SMS migration delays, and on and on. So based on what I have seen and configured for various large corporations and governments, I still wonder how you did this.
I think that if configured a network of SCSI channel connected 210's with tape striping (which Exabyte does not support in the sense that 3490 and equivalent type systems do support) I might be able to do an uncompressed throughput at about 60% of what you claim. Please send the tape logs to Slashdot. I am sure that it would interest many of us out here.
netatalk and friends will do the trick :)
Retrospect allows for backups to an FTP or AppleTalk server which you could have running on your Linux box (of course). The Retrospect server itself would be running on the iMac with clients on the Win boxes. Dantz fairly recently made clients for the Microsoft OSes, but the server still resides on the Mac. This solution is definately not free, but neither is most of the suggestions given thus far. However I don't have a simple solution of how to get the backups you've made to your Linux box onto tape. I'm quite new to Linux and I do not have a tape drive. One more product to consider.
/ express4_1_intro.html
Oh, how 'bout a URL:
http://www.dantz.com/dantz_products/prod_intros
Anyone here tried Time Navigator?
Yes I agree, your linux server can act as a
samba server and an Appletalk server.
Then just backup your linux server with
Burt or Amanda or what have you, or even a
well crafter GnuTar script.
We have a large Linux Server, NT/Mac network (80
NT clients and 4 Linux Servers) We use Samba 2.0.4b and NetAtalk
and it works great and had no problems and
excellent performance. We use Networker Client
for Linux and our server is an SGI Origin200.
Solid as a rock. We are also using an AIT
autoloader (2.0Terabyte - Qualstar box)
before we had the good stuff we had a single
2xPII300 Linux server running 2.0.36 kernel
and we ran backups from a shell script
using Gnutar and had no problems.
Gee if it is the Insider 3020 I have to ask if you've actually ever tried to restore from it...I had nine (yep 9) of them-All _BAD_! They had made engineering changes to the read/write head AND NEVER TESTED THEM before shipping...they failed under DOS, Win3, Win9, and OS/2...Iomega told me to eat'm...Computer Quick, my vendor, shoved them right back up Iomega's little hole twixt their Glutea Maximii for me (thanks again Todd!).
You might want to really test that little puppy before you do anything critical, or even useful with it. They make decent ashtrays if you balance them on end.
I have to share this too...Their tech, Anton Weber, spent one morning dodging my phone calls-when I finally got him on the phone, he told me he would have called me back, but he was too busy watching his Iomega stock rise...suffice it to say that I own no products made by said bozos.
You might want to take a look at NetMAX ( http://www.netmax.com ). It's a Linux server that can perform scheduled backups of Unix, Windows, and Macs. The Windows boxes do not need any client software. The Unix boxes need only tar and the Macs need an FTP server (included).
In the Windows\System directory, there are two hidden files:
/y /y
system.dat
user.dat
Together, they are the registry. They're hidden files and system files, but that's the only "trick". Most backup SW should have no problem with it.
If you were going the "simple" route (Samba sharing the Win98 drives), Samba *should* be able to handle the reading/writing of system and hidden files (I think there's a flag for this in smb.conf).
Even if there isn't you could still get around it: on the Win98 boxes, make a directory called C:\REGBACK or something like that. Then, in the autoexec.bat of the 98 boxes, add the following lines:
-------------
attrib -r -h -s c:\windows\system\system.dat
attrib -r -h -s c:\windows\system\user.dat
copy c:\windows\system\system.dat c:\regback
copy c:\windows\system\user.dat c:\regback
attrib +r +h +s c:\windows\system\system.dat
attrib +r +h +s c:\windows\system\user.dat
-------------
The only hangups:
1. I don't remember if they're in the windows\system directory, or just the windows directory. I don't have a machine handy to check here at work.
2. I don't remember if the files are read-only or not. Type this:
attrib c:\windows\system\system.dat
and the attributes of the file will display.. A means archive, H means hidden, S is system, R is read-only. If the current registry files are not read-only, then axe the "+r" statement from the last two lines above.
Restoring a registry is simple. Just un-system, un-hide, and un-read-only (if needed) the files:
attrib -r -h -s c:\windows\system\system.dat
attrib -r -h -s c:\windows\system\user.dat
and the windows-generated backups (that never work right... crappy microso~1):
attrib -r -h -s c:\windows\system\system.da0
attrib -r -h -s c:\windows\system\user.da0
and kill them:
del c:\windows\system\system.da?
del c:\windows\system\user.da?
then copy the new ones there, and re-hide/system/read-only(if needed) them:
attrib +h +r +s c:\windows\system\system.dat
attrib +h +r +s c:\windows\system\user.dat
Windows will create its own shitty, useless backup next time you enter Windows.
If he leaves work at 5pm and starts at 8am the next
morning, that would give him an "overnight" of
15 hours. This allows for a 5.5 hour buffer
over your calculations. It seems doable.
This sounds like another one of those Slashdot
bogus hero stories.
The cost of the DVD RAM, the creative labs/pansonic seems to be in reach, and recent threads suggest the some panasonic models will be adequately supported by linux soon if not already. With this in mind, it would be good if the backup software could use DVD RAM.
Might want to consider this, DAT tape backkup drives never did come down in price to "affordable" IMHO.
On a related note, what are some tape drives that work well with amanda and the like? It would be nice to have something with say a 2G capacity or so per tape.
24 servers and ~500 workstations here.
Workstations are throwaway items IMHO. If one's disk blows up, it gets re-cloned from the "Standard Workstation Template" hard disk Ghost image. Sure we have plenty of crybaby users who complain about losing all their customizations and personal stuff (that doesn't belong on a company owned workstation anyway) that they refuse to keep on the server. They think (erroneously) that if they keep their stuff only on their workstations that I can't snoop thru it. Screw 'em if they can't take a joke. The only workstations that gets backed up along with the servers are MINE. >B-}>
I work for VERITAS, and believe me, your feedback is valuable, and well noted, and will definately be looked into.
9 0614-0.html ). BE has huge marketshare in the NT space, and though the Microsoft-hating Unix folk out there may scoff, it's got a lot of market momentum. On the other hand, NetBackup, as others have stated here, is an awesome product. I've been through many mergers in the backup industry, and I've seen products swallowed and bastardized, and this one is comparatively quite benign. Of course there's going to be speculation about NetBackup and BE, because there's obvious market conflict, but the fact is, both are needed to provide a complete solution to large heterogeneous networks, and both are going to continue on at VERITAS. If you want to know what's going on with the VERITAS product lines, just read the posted material on the web. They're very forthcoming and honest about the whole thing.
The (former) Seagate part of Veritas is mainly an NT and NetWare - oriented software company - Backup Exec is actually included in Windows 2000 as the bundled backup applet (as a lite version). But VERITAS, bought Seagate Software's NSMG unit, and VERITAS is a more Unix-oriented company, so Unix support and coverage now appears on the corporate radar screen for the (former) Seagate groups. Whether or not that means eventual Open Source for Linux stuff is completely not my place to comment on, but improving on these weak points you mention is definately in consideration.
As far as BE becoming the "lite" version of NetBackup, I think that's just pretty wild speculation. It is in complete disagreement with the stated product direction posted on the web ( http://www.veritas.com/company/pressroom/1999/pr9
It's me, the anonymous coward VERITAS employee again.
There's a new class of backup products coming out now for protecting workstations. VERITAS Telebackup is what we sell for this. Unfortunately, it doesn't support a wide variety of clients right now, but likely will in the future.
A software agent sits on the client, and backs up the workstation data to the server's disk, tracks all the backups in a database, and files that are redundant across multiple workstations are not backed up more than once, the database tracks all that, and large files that have only a small amount of changes, only the changes are copied across the network. It's a truly awesome product.
For workstations that belong to executives, it's too much to ask to have them store their data on the server, but their data, if lost, could be critical to a company's survival. It's just a fact of life. IT folks would like it to be different, but it just isn't, and it's not going to change.
It's also ideal for backing up laptops, which are prone to theft or damage.
So don't be a BOFH. Backup those workstations!
It seems that a lot of folks who've been lucky
enough to never need to restore a backup, or
a piece of a backup, are able to get by just fine with tar, mounted filesystems, and other "simple
measures". These folks are what I call
"Write-only backup administrators". Peril to
them when the CEO wants his crashed Win95 box
up in under an hour, with no data lost...
When you have a lot of machines, and downtime
is a major no-no, it really pays to have a
"commercial grade" (not necessarily $$$) client-
server backup system which takes care of all of
the special cases on each client operating system,
is easily centrally administered, and can restore
an ENTIRE system easily following an installation
of a "lite" OS configuration and restore client.
(Some systems will even do the restore from a
completely RAM-based system like a miniroot.)
Unix backup procedures from the earliest days
warned admins to perform all backups from single-
user mode. Why?? So files were not being
modified by users (direct and network). Pretty
obvious, you would think... Backing up a
mounted file system is a classic example of a
thing which does 97% of the job... Unfortunately,
in a mission critical environment, solid backup
has the same status as oxygen...
using CDR for backups is just a bad idea.. this is what tape is fore.. CD's make better archives.. but well let that go. You could tweek amanda to do this.. just change the taper to do mkisofs then send it to cdrecord.. the problem here is that your only going to put 650MB's per disk.. this usally isnt enough.. so you could "flush" the dumps Or you could buy serveral CD-R's and burn an array of disks.. but again this isnt very practical.. just get a tape drive.
Burt also supports multiple OS's. It can support more OS's than Amanda can.
From a security standpoint, you're asking for trouble by using the Internet gateway\proxy as a tape backup host.
Its not as nice as CygWin, but check out MacMiNT at ftp://ftp.linuxppc.org /users/harry/MacMiNT_PowerPC_Cross.bin. At least some basic support for shell scripting, makefiles, gcc, etc... Andrew Beyer
I cover several, the ones I liked are:o rker.html - Legato Networker Linux client
Backups
http://www.amnda.org/ - Amanda
ftp://ftp.zn-gmbh.com/pub/linux/ - afbackup
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jmelski/burt/ - Burt
http://www.estinc.com/features.html - BRU
http://www.estinc.com/qsdr.html - Quickstart
http://www.unitrends.com/bp.html - Backup Professional
http://www.unitrends.com/ctar.html - CTAR
http://www.unitrends.com/ctarnet.html - CTAR:NET
http://www.unitrends.com/pcpara.html - PC ParaChute
Commercial:
http://www.arkeia.com/ - Arkeia
http://www.legato.com/Products/html/legato_netw
http://feral.com/networker.html - Legato Networker server
Now not all handle multiple OS's, etc. But of the freeones it was afbackup or amanda (or both) that did.
good luck.
http://www.seifried.org/lasg/
One think you should remember is that you may not want to do full backups on the machines that don't have the compatable tape drive -- you won't be able to load the data off of the server to the client without getting the OS installed even after a disk crash!
What I'd do is use netatalk and samba to have the same (home, maybe) mounted on all the machines... that way you have a centralized point that has all your important data. Additional data could be left only on the server.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
The grape vine has told me that Veritas software will be releasing netbackup client and then later server.. it's expensive, but it's the BEST backup system out there.. the only thing that I know of that comes close is HP Omni-back.. but no linux for that one. there may also be a version of NETbackup lite.. (seagate backup exec was bought by Vertias recently.. this will become lite)
Well for one thing, 9 GB of data can fit on a $14 12/24 gig DDS-3 tape.
These tapes were made to be rewritten over 1,000 times, aren't prone to scratching, doesn't require swapping for only 9 gigs of data, and are very small.
Not to mention tape is slightly faster writing than CD-RW's. While CD-RW's write at 300-600 KB/s, tapes can write at about 10-20x that.
You pay a little more for a tape drive, $700-$900 for an drive depending on make/model and internal or external.
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
There is an SMB networking client for the Mac named Dave. I don't believe that it is free (though I could be wrong), but I do know that you can at least mount smb volumes from a Mac. Can you share out folders? Well, I'm not to sure about that one.
I have never used Appletalk, and I don't really know what it's about, but I assume that it is yet another file sharing system. Linux kernels have support for AppleTalk. Perhaps you could copy files from your Mac via the AppleTalk daemon.
Good luck to you!
something clever
Posted by iamnarf:
I heartily second the motion for Retrospect.
I got a freebie copy with a DAT drive. It rules!
Put the tape drive on your Mac, mount everything
to be backed up on it, and Just Do It. It is Really Easy, and it works Very Well.
A nice package, albeit a bit "foreign" when it comes to their terminology. Disk packs, save packs and other funkyness. But overall an excellent product, fast, stable - and with many, many clients supported.
According to our backup server (and the number of tapes we go through), since version 6.5, Backup Exec has backed up with incremental backups. I have no experience with prior versions, so I can't comment on them.
If you can't get it to work, that's not Backup Exec's fault.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
Mount the filesystems of the systems being backed up and then simply archive to tape on the server side. The clients don't need any special software to connect to a ``backup daemon'' on the server. The problem then boils down to supporting the various filesystems.
I do the same thing with my users. Mind you, it's 4 servers and 20 clients, but the idea is the same.
anything you want to keep is to be kept on the server.
I fully reserve the right to come in on the weekend and change your workstation around (bigger/faster/whatever). Anything on the local drive is temporary. Only two have learned the hard way. The rest all do as I say and keep important stuff on the server.
If that makes me a BOFH, then I accept. But I'll be god damned if I'm gonna worry about each and every workstation we have and recuing some program or data that I have repeatedly told them to keep on the server if it was important!
Linux supports smbfs, so you can mount Windows drives alright. I'm clueless on the Apple side of things, but I've seen the term 'AppleTalk', so maybe Linux can mount Macintosh drives too. From there you could just a simple 'tar c /mnt/*' and problem solved, right?
VERITAS Backup Exec UNIX Client:
http://support.veritas.com/menu _ddProduct_BEWNT.htm
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Granted, Legato is not open source or anything. But it is a pretty nice piece of backup software, and supports backing up almost everything out there to a single tape. I've been running the linux client for months, and have zero problems - it just works.
Where can I download a Linux client?? ( I forget which version of NB I'm using).
-- I speak only for myself.
I don't know too much about this subject but I will be following along. My network is much like yours, except the server is my G3 Mac. I know... building Linux PC for that task so I don't have to reboot my Win98/Linux box every now and then.
Unfortunately for the Mac there is no free UNIX-like shell, like CygWin on the PC, so you miss some scripting tools.
Have you set up Netatalk and the piece that lets Linux talk back to the Mac? You might be able to use Retrospect on the Mac, then AppleScript midnight copies to the "Appleshare" running on Linux.
I odn't have a solution, but maybe some of this helps. Cheers,
Get Retrospect Express v.4.1 for the iMac. It is capable of scheduled backups and what not. It can even turn the machine on, back it up, and shut it down.
And it will backup to an FTP server too.. so just create a MacBackup directory on the Linux box, and have the iMac do it's backups to that directory, then just back those files up to tape from the Linux box locally.
I'm pretty sure it will do the same for Windows, and it's pretty cheap (Cheaper than BackUp Exec.)
Reeses
Please tell us your url when it is ready.
Thanks.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Well, since we're on the topic of backups.. does anybody know of a backup program that supports multi-volume CDRW backups and backup levels?
... CD's are an unexplored area for unix in general...
Linux seems sadly lacking in the area of backups - it's all based around backup-to-tape
--
Legato networker will do what you describe, but it's pretty darned expensive. It isn't meant for small installations, though. I don't know what I'd do without it, though. Check it out at www.legato.com
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Well, I've seen a few of my thoughts already said earlier, but I figured I'd tell you what I've been doing. I have a dedicated server that does nothing but backup. Over 400 gigs go through it to a 15 tape DLT library per week. We have ~60 workstations and 4 servers.
My policy on it irritates people, hence the title of my post. With the number of workstations I have to manage, I consider workstations expendable. If the Win9x/Winnt4 station eats itself, oh well... reinstall and get on with it. I tell everyone to keep anything they care about ON THE SERVER. Some dont listen, and they lose stuff when Windows blows up completely.
I hit TAB/SPACE and it submitted :P. So I suck. Anyway what I was going to say was....
/var/log files. Cat and grep let me find what is where.
:) If not, please do! Encryption is our friend, even if El Reno says it's evil.
My setup is this: On my dedicated backup server I have NFS mounts to the main Linux servers. I run BRU on a crontab that does a incremental backup daily and a full backup weekly. I used a rather ugly hack on the MTX driver for the DLT library control, but it works very well. I chose BRU because of it's verify pass on backups. Makes me feel better about the amazing amount of data I've been asked to manage. For the database, I just dump the contents of what it backed up into different
My point is that if you keep everything on servers, locating, backing up, and restoring is easier.
However, if you must keep stuff on the Windows machines, smbmount should work fine allowing you to keep everything mounted in one place. Someone already said this, but for the Mac, use one of the utils that lets you use SMB and "share" the directories.
One last note, if you are doing this over the internet, I would hope you're using a vpn of some sort
1)My network is 100 base switched. My servers have hardware RAID 5. My setup is three times the speed of a hard drive on a workstation. There is no delay for saving to the network. None.
2)I dont back up my workstation. I keep my stuff on the server.
3)I have drop in replacements sitting in the back. The customizing for the individual user takes maybe an hour. Restoring from tape takes FOREVER. Besides, the user can shift over to another workstation while I'm setting up Outlook and the other stuff. Big deal.
4)Backing up all the workstations would make my already enormous backup even bigger. This costs more money in tapes, takes longer, and is harder to sift through when there is a problem.
5)I dont know if you noticed, but I have not been using the term "we". Guess why! Because I'm the only one who does internal support. With it being only me, I _need_ everything centralized.
how can you claim that you are 100% microsoft free, when microsoft is a stock holder of apple??? :)
maybe you don't use ms products/services, but you're not 100% free of microsoft (sucks doesn't it!!)..
I've got a setup at my work where the computer with the tape drive (FreeBSD) FTPs to any machine on our network, downloads files, then tars the downloaded files onto the tape. All done within a couple easy-to-understand shell scripts.
It's probably not the fastest way to do backups, but it's simple, fast to implement, and easy to extend.
Can someone please explain the advantage, if any, of paying for backup software for computers that are on the same network? Being that you can have the linux box mount almost any filesystem in existance, even in read-only mode, and then tar that file system to a tape or automagically burn to a cd or even just make the iso filesystem image.. Someone please tell me WHY there is ANY market for software to let you do this under linux????? Are there any advantages to it, because I sure don't see any..
For the Win95/98/NT at least. First, share your Widows HD's in ro mode. Use smbmount to mount the Windows volumes (actually the whole HD) across the network and then use any Linux backup utility you like. Better yet, I believe the automounter can handle SMB mounts - setup the automounter so that
//win01/c, //win02/c etc. Then all you have to do is setup your backup tool or cron to backup /mnt/smb/*
/mnt/smb/win01/c
/mnt/smb/win02/c
...
get mounted to
I don't know about the Mac - but if you can find a way to mount a Mac volume from Linux your set.
If autofs cannot handle SMB mounts - just write a perl script that will parse a text file with this information and have your backup tool/cron run this script first.
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
It's better to use the linux box as a real server, then configure the other machines to store *important* files on the server. Don't back up the clients, just the server. Since you have to re-install windoze every 10 minutes, this is nice too becuase you can trash the windows box, re-install everything and still have all your important files accessible. Restoring backups on windoze is a nightmare (without something like arcada (even then, I bet it's a mini-nightmare)) because of their brain-dead long filenames.
-=Julian=-
the ssh family of commands is designed as a drop-in-replacement for the r* family commands. If you use ssh, you can still do this.
-earl
Arkeia from Knox Software will do this.
Alternately you could use BRU and do the same thing (via scripts and shares...)
HTH
-- none, thank you.
A client already exists.. It was released with Netbackup 3.2.. As far as a server, I'll leave that to the rumor mill yet..
Backup Exec isn't going anywhere for awhile either.
Netbackup is a cool product.. yes spendy, but it does everything under the sun.
(yes, I work for veritas, so I may be biased)
I agree.
Retrospect is excellent, only problem is that the server only runs on Mac (a beta of the NT exist but is not usable yet.). We use it to back up about 100 macs and some pcs. We have done backups to tapes and to CD's. No problems.
On my machines (some 10 unix machines) we only use some scripts that search for files that has changed since tha last backup, and then afio these files to the tape. Main problem is that we create to many files and the tape station is not reliable enough. We will change to CD or DVD soon (when someone has time to change the script)
Copyright 1998 arne Verbatim copying and distribution is permited as long as this message is preserved
Has anyone found a good package that supports AS/400? I'd like to recommend to my boss something Linux based that will backup our NT boxes and the AS/400 over the network...
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
Oops... actually, the config file *is* protected with mode user read-only.... my bad. Sorry Veritas guys.
Actually, if you're talking about a Linux "agent" for Veritas (formerly Seagate) Backup Exec, it exists currently. I've just finished installing it on 5 Linux machines we have here. It's (obviously) not open source.
To do this I hadx to buy the 7.3 version of Backup Exec for NT... (I upgraded from 7.0... it was like $400 for the upgrade). On the CD is a Linux "agent". It installs pretty nicely if you have Red Hat 5.2... otherwise gives you a warning about "unsupported UNIX platform" but worked OK on RH 5.0 and RH 6.0 (we don't have any other distributions, call me a follower... my guess is that it wont be pleasant to get it to work under another distro) It so far is also a real pig... Linux clients get backed up to the NT BE server at about 4.8MB/min (what is that? 500kbps?). In any case, 4.8MB/min across an Ethernet during a backup is not good. By way of comparison, our Windows clients get backed up at about 170MB/min.
Additionall problems: the agent requires a password for access by the backup server... you specify the password during the install of the agent on the Linux machines.
The password is:
1. shown in the clear as you type it in (the install is just a batch script, guess they didn't know how to change the tty settings during the password entry).
2. stored in the clear in a config file
3. exposed to all users, as the directory the agent install creates and the agent config file is permitted rx for other. (i changed it, of course, to be unreadable by anyone but root)
three things that tip you off that the guys in this division of Veritas dont write much UNIX software:
1. the speed
2. the default security problems i mentioned
3. the agents come in a tar file that, when untarred,expands files into the current directory instead of creating a directory from your current one (not a big deal, but its a tipoff that they're used to PKZIP).
4. the post-agent-install tip that you can start the daemon by "restarting your workstation". so funny. not just "/etc/rc.d/init.d/agent.init start", but "restart your workstation". it's classic.
In any case, I'm glad the agent exists even with its faults because it makes my life much easier.. rather than having to administer 2 backup systems (one for NT, one for *NIX), I can do it all from one console... Of course, I don't know if it actually completely *works* yet, as the backup is running as we speak, but hopefully the verify results work out...
Bottom line observation: Commercial software running on Linux is sort of scary. None of the niceties of community-produced stuff. I dont think I'd *want* to see the code...
on Sunsite/Metalab, (and many other sites) there's a package called MacDump. I looked into it, but never actually ran it. I believe it's a simple daemon-like process on the mac that allows a unix client to suck information from the harddrive for backup purposes.
Not that this is necessarily the best solution out there, but I mention it for completeness.
I have almost the same setup - a Linux server, another Linux machine, 2 Windows NT boxes (blame my wife), and a Mac.
:-)
I bought the personal edition of Retrospect for the Mac, and backup via FTP to the Linux server. Hard disks are cheap enough for this to be the easiest solution for me (I use an old slow one for the backup).
For the Windows machines, the Linux box mounts their disks with smbmount.
Then I can run BRU Personal Edition (came with RedHat) on the Linux machine to back all this up.
When I got a second Linux box (firewall) I NFSed that up to the main server, and bought the normal version of BRU which will do NFS drives.
There are probably better ways to do all this, but this method works well enough for me, and I'd rather spend my time messing with other things
Simon
Work blog: http://elnblog.com Personal blog: http://simoncoles.org
There is an unsupported Linux OmniBack client (has been for more than a year). I don't know if it is publically available.
One approach is to redefine the problem. This approach will take some time, but you may find it worthwhile.
Instead of asking how your Linux server can back up Windows and Mac clients, why not ask how much you can move from your Windows and Mac systems to the Linux server?!
After my Windows system crashed yet again, I reinstalled the system (which, thanks to Toshiba, formats the disk so I lose any files which survived the crash) I set it up to use a network login - my "profile" and personal files are stored on my Linux system in an ext2 partition... and are backed up nightly. Likewise, I reinstalled all of my applications to a SAMBA "network" drive. I then changed the permissions so most of the files were read-only - no more Word viruses.
This isn't perfect, but I'm a lot more comfortable with my Window system mounting network drives from my Linux box than my Linux box trying to SMBMOUNT the Windows system for backups.
P.S., I use Amanda.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Maybe you should do what they pay you the big bucks for, instead of cry-babying about how your job is going to be harder. Because YOU dont want to have YOUR network-administrator job become harder, which is what they pay you for in the first place, you are having everyone in the company who works on documents experience tripled delays for disk access to their documents? I think the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. And backing up only YOUR workstations is a load of shit and that proves it. It shows that you realize as well as everyone else that it is very preferable to have the customizations/etc backed up, rather than dicking around on company time restoring them and "getting back up to speed" once they are lost.
PS: I'm probably a better network admin than an employee, although my employee-bias probably makes me appear otherwise.
I know that r* daemons ought to be disabled as soon as you install your OS, but one of the nicest uses for them is:
/dropZone \; tar xvBpf
/dev/yourTapeDrive. I did this for my *nix machines.
tar cf - yourDir | rsh remoteHost cd
or tar it to
As for desktop OSs: Servers get backed up. Desktops don't. Clients pull files. Servers serve them. Therefore clients keep files on servers or risk being LARTed hard.
--jpg
-jpeg
Here's what we do to handle back-ups for an entire LAN of mixed machine types. First, we have a SCSI DAT II drive hooked up to the Linux box and a cron task that runs nightly and backs up all the contents of a single directory (/home/shared in our case.)
We also have samba and netatalk installed on this machine so both Macs and PCs can mount the shared volume as a network volume. We then use platform-specific back-up tools (Retrospect from Dantz in this case for both machine types, but you can mix and match)on each machine to write back-up archives to the shared Linux volume.
The cron task fires up tar at 4 AM and streams the whole pile of archives off to tape. First person in in the morning swaps tapes.
One advantage of using Retrospect is that it can perform Mac and PC back-ups via FTP, without the need to mount a shared volume.
C.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
I have to speak up for Amanda - it's good for you. - http://www.amanda.org/
well... if your quest for commercial alternatives fails, what i would do is set up ftpd on your linux box, then either cook up some little java clients that do exactly what you want when you want them to, or find some kind of scriptable ftp client. if you roll your own, you can easily ftp what you want to your linux server, and then have the server tar it up and roll it off onto tape.
alternatively there are NFS classes form sun, so you could get your mac and wins to nfs mount via java and move the files that way.
I like my setup:
All my data is on my Server. I a workstation goes down I don't care - I have not lost anything. I backup my server.
I do fiddle around a lot with my PC's. I like to try out different OS's, different Apps.
I create base OS installs with all updates and current drivers, then I use Ghost or DriveImage Pro to create images of these base OS installs on my server. That way I can restore them whenever I want. With compression, even an NT installation takes under 150Meg on mt server.
Another trick for rapid restores: My primary workstation runs NT (don't flame me - I am already in a world of pain!!!!). I have a 1 Gig boot/system partition, and a 7 Gig partition. I frequently backup the 1 Gig partition that holds the OS by Ghosting it to my server. I install apps to the D: drive. If my system crashes, I restore the C: drive, and I am OK - that restores the OS, registry, and most system files. A nice rapid restore (not %100 fool proof, but very convenient.)
Good luck.
BTW: There is a free imaging app available at:
http://cuiwww.unige.ch/info/pc/remote-boot/howt
It is part of their great and imaging remote boot solution!
We use this to back up 200GB every night to an exabyte 210.
It has clients for most everything, server is similar.
We run it on Linux.
Don't remember a Mac client, however, use netatalk, and have the Mac copy itself to a volume on the Linux Box...then back up that volume.
I've been using smbtar to back up nine or ten Windows NT machines for about a year onto a DAT tape on the linux machine. I wrote some simple scripts to incremental backups every night and a full backup once a week. It has worked very well for us.
smbtar comes with samba.
I'm also running netatalk to share files on the linux box with a Macintosh, but I don't have a clue how to back up the Mac.
I has this problem in my workplace. Some WinNTWS machines needed to be 24x7 running (Oh my...!!) and must be replaced in minutes if(when) something goes wrong. I've made a Java Server that makes copies of some shares through sambatar to a Linux machine every X minutes. When we replace the HD of the failed machine with a fresh copy of an empty WinNT, we touch a "token" file in the shares of the PC and the server restores the information automatically with the latest Copy. It works fairly well.
Ah!! I have another question, is possible to use CVS as a backup server? I think it could be amazing. Someone tried this?
==
That's the time harvesters,that's the time to be care
get back all this people, so ostentatious and arrogan
Try Amanda. It uses dump or tar on UNIX, and I think there may be some clients for Windoze. Also look for BURT on Freshmeat. That one looked interesting, requires TCL.
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IBM (I know I Know) Makes a product called ADSM It is a client/server enterprise backup solution. There are both the client and server for LiNUX, as well as clients for AIX, MAC, WinXX, OS/2 AS/400 etc...