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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."
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/
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
--
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=-
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...
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