I use it myself - upgraded from a simple DLT-v4 drive to a LTO-3 Dell PowerVault library about two days ago and it went worryingly smoothly.
The trick with Bacula is not to try and force it to run your way, but instead understand how it works then work with it. If you've used backup software like Tivoli Storage Manager before, you'll be able to understand it pretty easily.
Works cross-platform beautifully - I'm backing up about a dozen hosts (mostly Linux, one Windows). The only drawback is that AFAIK there's no configuration GUI - it's all setup through text-based config files. But the documentation is excellent, the mailing lists responsive and friendly (which is more than I can say for some open-source projects).
I like the discussion put forward in the Red Dwarf book (unfortunately never used in the TV series):
They [humans] disagreed about politics, religion, philosophy - everything. And the reason was this: basically, all human beings believed all other human beings were insane, in varying degrees................... Small wonder, then, that homo sapiens spent most of their short time on Earth waging war with one another.
For their first few thousand years on the planet they did little else, and they discovered two things that were rather curious: the first was that when they were at war, they agreed more. Whole nations agreed that other nations were insane, and they agreed that the mutually beneficial solution was to band together to eliminate the loonies. For many people, it was the most agreeable period of their lives, because, apart from a brief period on New Year's Eve (which, incidentally, no-one could agree the date of), the only time human beings lived happily side by side was when they were trying to kill one another.
Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, the human race hit a major problem. It got so good at war, it couldn't have one anymore.
It had spent so much time practising and perfecting the art of genocide, developing more and more lethal devices for mass destruction, that conducting a war without obliterating the planet and everything on it became an impossibility.
IBM managed it when they migrated the architecture of their AS/400 (now zSeries) mainframe from some custom CISC chip to a POWER-based platform.
But to return to the original topic, I'm given to understand that way back in the mid '90s (back when there were a lot of architectures), Intel announced that they were working on their own "next generation" chip which would replace x86 and ultimately hammer everything else into the ground - the Itanium. Back then the x86 wasn't much, and it was easily beaten by Sparc, MIPS, Alpha and almost anything else you can think of.
But Intel had a lot of money, and the companies behind many of these chips started shaking in their little silicon socks. What's the point of continuing to develop a MIPS workstation processor (CPU development is very expensive) when Intel are going to the roundly thrash them in the marketplace within 2 years? Far better to spend the money on developing the platform, where there was still some competition.
Intel's processor was delayed and delayed. When it eventually showed up, it was pretty poor. But by then it was far too late - many of these companies had essentially stopped developing their architectures and the x86 had caught up. Because of the economies of scale, suddenly it was possible to build a serious server on an x86 platform and it would be a lot cheaper than anything else on the market.
I like to think of it as sticking-plaster to solve an age old problem: Software sucks.
Sometimes two pieces of software don't play nicely together, sometimes they're not available for your OS of choice (or the OS of your choice no longer supports any hardware you can still purchase), sometimes it brings the whole system crashing to the ground and you'd like to limit the damage it can do to a single virtual machine running one process rather than a physical machine running many. Or maybe you don't expect every service's hardware requirements to grow equally (file storage requirements are likely to grow much faster than DNS performance requirements) and you'd like to minimise disruption when it inevitably becomes necessary to upgrade the hardware platform.
Of course, virtualisation is itself a layer of software (sometimes with supporting hardware, as in Pacifica/Vanderpool). So it also sucks. You just have to hope it sucks less than running the whole lot as one bug physical system - which is generally the case.
Because the consultant charges by the hour, and your solution involves many more hours for what is not perceived by most people to be a substantial benefit.
"Your information is locked into proprietary formats". Big deal. Most small business owners don't know what that means, all they know is that regardless of what the format is, they'll have to pay some computer person to get the data out if their normal program stops working. Meantime, it can just carry on working.
Last summer I took my car to a mechanic. He had a nice shiny modern PC and an equally shiny laptop, with some swanky software which gave step by step instructions and expected time to complete for more or less any common task on any vehicle you could thing of. When he came to invoice me, he fired up an elderly clone of Sage from back when Sage was a DOS application (called "Page"). So the data's in a proprietary format? Who cares, the program still works. Even if it was in something like XML, he'd have to pay someone to turn a bunch of XML into a usable application - which would cost a lot more money than just buy a more modern program which does the same job. Just as easy (and rather cheaper) that if his next PC (which will doubtless run Vista) won't run the program, to put all new customer information into some new program and keep the old one hanging around on an old PC until the information is no longer needed.
See, this is where so many assumptions fall over. In this case, the assumption is "It doesn't need to take more than a week or so".
This student of yours presumably had relatively little else to occupy them over the course of that week, or if they did it was relatively easy to divide their time such that they could get a good few hours at a time to look at the problem. This isn't true for someone running a small business, who's busy serving customers, preparing accounts, dealing with suppliers, paying staff, checking inventory, spending quality time with the family. Add in some time to sleep, eat, shit and shower and before you know it the old adage about "not enough hours in the day" is true.
If it's a choice between "Buy off the shelf software and pay someone 1 or 2 days consultancy to set it up" and "Spend weeks investigating open-source solutions, ultimately cobbling together various things which were never meant to be cobbled together, and then paying for a months' consultancy to write software which ties together the final loose ends", you'd have to be off your nut (or seriously anti-microsoft) to choose the latter.
Perhaps I'm looking at this from a different angle.
Where the business is really small (like some individual guy knocking stuff out of a tiny shop who has about 2 PCs), then yeah, there's not a lot of point in bothering with the whole "shiny new server with redundant everything and 4-hour response warranty" thing. May as well just back up to CD or DVD, and copy it back across in the event of failure.
When the company's much larger and there is a need for proper support, that's when the 4-hour support contracts kick in. Generally there's a dirty great warehouse attached to a courier firm and as soon as the tech on the phone has decided what's needed, a fax goes to the courier saying "Pick this part number off this shelf in the warehouse and ship it to this address NOW. No, not 'when you feel like it'. NOW.". A man with a screwdriver shows up within that timescale as well - generally speaking, the training he'll have had is little more than "to install this part number, remove A, B and C, replace part, then reverse the process" and the server is designed such that replacing almost anything (right down to the motherboard itself) is no more than a 15 minute job.
Ideal for me as I can't afford two backup systems (one onsite hotspare to run the business if the main system fails, and a means to get 200GB+ of data offsite), so the onsite DR procedure becomes "ring up Dell, it's their problem, restore from tape if nescessary". We can live with the 4 hour response time, if we couldn't then it would be a lot easier to justify buying everything twice so there's always a hotspare.
"you won't be able to get the parts to turn a dead box back into a live one"
Yes, well, another reason to avoid 'brand name' boxes like the plague and buy standard components.
Where do I buy a standard motherboard (where I can be certain of getting the exact same model on less than 4 hours notice in 2 years time) and standard dual-redundant power supply?
The box he was shipping to his client originally had a 40GB hard drive in it, which immediately makes it a couple of years old. He's probably recycling an old box he had lying around.
Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but if it's going out to the clients site to host important stuff, you probably want nice shiny new hardware rather than some 3 year old PC with an almost burnt-out PSU and zero warranty support (which means that you won't be able to get the parts to turn a dead box back into a live one - in the event of hardware failure, you'll have to restore from backup).
But with analogue formats like VHS, the degradation is graceful. You can still watch the movie, though it may be rather grainy and the sound rather patchy.
Digital data, particularly when stored in most modern lossy formats (like DVD), doesn't have this benefit. Once it becomes hard to read, it goes from "works perfectly" to "completely useless" very quickly and with little warning.
Finding a drive for a backup tape will be harder than finding an interface for a hard disk.
This is exactly the problem I faced recently when deciding whether or not to stick with tape backup.
Solution: The next version of bacula will support volume migration, so I can migrate all my old data with minimal pain. Who cares if I can't find a drive for a 10 year old tape? I'll have migrated all the data to a newer one long before.
Don't know about your part of the world, but here in the UK, most if not all DVRs on the market are digital-only devices which get their programme guide from the digital signal. AFAICT, this is what TiVO are charging for - the "privilege" of your TiVO's serial number being on a list of "paid up users" so when it phones home to say "Hi, I'm serial number 123456789, can I have a programme guide?" the computer at the other end says "Yeah, sure, here you go" rather than "You haven't paid. Go away."
Make every 3+ year sentence come with mandatory castration.
Have you been reading Robert Rankin? One of his characters argued that criminal tendencies were genetic and proposed this as a solution, only it was roundly shouted down as not stopping them from committing further crime and the humanitarian aspects of compulsory sterilisation.
His solution was compulsory execution of all criminals.
Really? Ours have a fetish for traffic lights. On one 2-mile fairly straightforward drive I counted 18 sets, most of which didn't need to be there. Strangely, they always come up in January-March time, right at the end of the financial year.
Well, Gutmann is known in my circles for having done some good work, and having a track record that goes back for years.
Yeah, I noticed that it was written by someone who's known not to be a complete moron.
Myself, I am now beginning to wonder if it's worth rolling out Linux to the next round of desktops and using Terminal Services for any software which has to be Windows-run. Probably wind up cheaper anyhow.
Linux has a few advantages over Microsoft products. And licensing is one of the biggest advantages for the end user.
Don't underestimate that. If Microsoft start sic'ing their licensing dogs on more companies, it will become more of an issue.
The reason why is this: I've looked into the various licensing options and concluded that you aren't expected to understand them or comply with them. There's no way anyone could be reasonably expected to comply with licensing like that without seeking professional legal advice with every mouse click. The whole system is designed to set you up for failure, presumably so that if they send the BSA around for an audit, they're bound to find something that's not up to scratch.
Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape
So you either need a nice fast link to another site (fast enough to handle all the replication) or you need to accept that in the event of a disaster, you've lost your email system permanently.
Assuming you have such a link, you have to hope that nobody ever gets disgruntled, or your nice shiny replica will merrily replicate all the deleting they do.
Except that at some point they changed the spec of the charger to supply a substantially higher voltage - the old type will still charge a newer phone, but a lot more slowly.
Confused the hell out of my brother who couldn't figure out why his nice shiny new phone had lousy battery life - he'd only ever charged it using the old charger and it had never had a proper full charge.
The 64 bit version probably will be more RAM hungry. All that nice 64-bit goodness uses 64-bit pointers and 64-bit ints, thus needing twice the RAM for many of the more common data types.
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If it's LBA48 support you were missing, Microsoft did release a patch for XP to support that.
No sane OS has paid the remotest bit of attention to what the BIOS thinks the disk is in years.
Forgive me if I'm not up on the latest jargon, but what's the difference between a grid and a cluster?
I use it myself - upgraded from a simple DLT-v4 drive to a LTO-3 Dell PowerVault library about two days ago and it went worryingly smoothly.
The trick with Bacula is not to try and force it to run your way, but instead understand how it works then work with it. If you've used backup software like Tivoli Storage Manager before, you'll be able to understand it pretty easily.
Works cross-platform beautifully - I'm backing up about a dozen hosts (mostly Linux, one Windows). The only drawback is that AFAIK there's no configuration GUI - it's all setup through text-based config files. But the documentation is excellent, the mailing lists responsive and friendly (which is more than I can say for some open-source projects).
IBM managed it when they migrated the architecture of their AS/400 (now zSeries) mainframe from some custom CISC chip to a POWER-based platform.
But to return to the original topic, I'm given to understand that way back in the mid '90s (back when there were a lot of architectures), Intel announced that they were working on their own "next generation" chip which would replace x86 and ultimately hammer everything else into the ground - the Itanium. Back then the x86 wasn't much, and it was easily beaten by Sparc, MIPS, Alpha and almost anything else you can think of.
But Intel had a lot of money, and the companies behind many of these chips started shaking in their little silicon socks. What's the point of continuing to develop a MIPS workstation processor (CPU development is very expensive) when Intel are going to the roundly thrash them in the marketplace within 2 years? Far better to spend the money on developing the platform, where there was still some competition.
Intel's processor was delayed and delayed. When it eventually showed up, it was pretty poor. But by then it was far too late - many of these companies had essentially stopped developing their architectures and the x86 had caught up. Because of the economies of scale, suddenly it was possible to build a serious server on an x86 platform and it would be a lot cheaper than anything else on the market.
The rest, as they say, is history.
I like to think of it as sticking-plaster to solve an age old problem: Software sucks.
Sometimes two pieces of software don't play nicely together, sometimes they're not available for your OS of choice (or the OS of your choice no longer supports any hardware you can still purchase), sometimes it brings the whole system crashing to the ground and you'd like to limit the damage it can do to a single virtual machine running one process rather than a physical machine running many. Or maybe you don't expect every service's hardware requirements to grow equally (file storage requirements are likely to grow much faster than DNS performance requirements) and you'd like to minimise disruption when it inevitably becomes necessary to upgrade the hardware platform.
Of course, virtualisation is itself a layer of software (sometimes with supporting hardware, as in Pacifica/Vanderpool). So it also sucks. You just have to hope it sucks less than running the whole lot as one bug physical system - which is generally the case.
Because the consultant charges by the hour, and your solution involves many more hours for what is not perceived by most people to be a substantial benefit.
"Your information is locked into proprietary formats". Big deal. Most small business owners don't know what that means, all they know is that regardless of what the format is, they'll have to pay some computer person to get the data out if their normal program stops working. Meantime, it can just carry on working.
Last summer I took my car to a mechanic. He had a nice shiny modern PC and an equally shiny laptop, with some swanky software which gave step by step instructions and expected time to complete for more or less any common task on any vehicle you could thing of. When he came to invoice me, he fired up an elderly clone of Sage from back when Sage was a DOS application (called "Page"). So the data's in a proprietary format? Who cares, the program still works. Even if it was in something like XML, he'd have to pay someone to turn a bunch of XML into a usable application - which would cost a lot more money than just buy a more modern program which does the same job. Just as easy (and rather cheaper) that if his next PC (which will doubtless run Vista) won't run the program, to put all new customer information into some new program and keep the old one hanging around on an old PC until the information is no longer needed.
See, this is where so many assumptions fall over. In this case, the assumption is "It doesn't need to take more than a week or so".
This student of yours presumably had relatively little else to occupy them over the course of that week, or if they did it was relatively easy to divide their time such that they could get a good few hours at a time to look at the problem. This isn't true for someone running a small business, who's busy serving customers, preparing accounts, dealing with suppliers, paying staff, checking inventory, spending quality time with the family. Add in some time to sleep, eat, shit and shower and before you know it the old adage about "not enough hours in the day" is true.
If it's a choice between "Buy off the shelf software and pay someone 1 or 2 days consultancy to set it up" and "Spend weeks investigating open-source solutions, ultimately cobbling together various things which were never meant to be cobbled together, and then paying for a months' consultancy to write software which ties together the final loose ends", you'd have to be off your nut (or seriously anti-microsoft) to choose the latter.
Perhaps I'm looking at this from a different angle.
Where the business is really small (like some individual guy knocking stuff out of a tiny shop who has about 2 PCs), then yeah, there's not a lot of point in bothering with the whole "shiny new server with redundant everything and 4-hour response warranty" thing. May as well just back up to CD or DVD, and copy it back across in the event of failure.
When the company's much larger and there is a need for proper support, that's when the 4-hour support contracts kick in. Generally there's a dirty great warehouse attached to a courier firm and as soon as the tech on the phone has decided what's needed, a fax goes to the courier saying "Pick this part number off this shelf in the warehouse and ship it to this address NOW. No, not 'when you feel like it'. NOW.". A man with a screwdriver shows up within that timescale as well - generally speaking, the training he'll have had is little more than "to install this part number, remove A, B and C, replace part, then reverse the process" and the server is designed such that replacing almost anything (right down to the motherboard itself) is no more than a 15 minute job.
Ideal for me as I can't afford two backup systems (one onsite hotspare to run the business if the main system fails, and a means to get 200GB+ of data offsite), so the onsite DR procedure becomes "ring up Dell, it's their problem, restore from tape if nescessary". We can live with the 4 hour response time, if we couldn't then it would be a lot easier to justify buying everything twice so there's always a hotspare.
"you won't be able to get the parts to turn a dead box back into a live one"
Yes, well, another reason to avoid 'brand name' boxes like the plague and buy standard components.
Where do I buy a standard motherboard (where I can be certain of getting the exact same model on less than 4 hours notice in 2 years time) and standard dual-redundant power supply?
and how about a prepaid credit card
Very rare here in the UK. Almost all current accounts (checking accounts in US parlance) come with a debit card.
It's better than that.
The box he was shipping to his client originally had a 40GB hard drive in it, which immediately makes it a couple of years old. He's probably recycling an old box he had lying around.
Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but if it's going out to the clients site to host important stuff, you probably want nice shiny new hardware rather than some 3 year old PC with an almost burnt-out PSU and zero warranty support (which means that you won't be able to get the parts to turn a dead box back into a live one - in the event of hardware failure, you'll have to restore from backup).
But with analogue formats like VHS, the degradation is graceful. You can still watch the movie, though it may be rather grainy and the sound rather patchy.
Digital data, particularly when stored in most modern lossy formats (like DVD), doesn't have this benefit. Once it becomes hard to read, it goes from "works perfectly" to "completely useless" very quickly and with little warning.
Finding a drive for a backup tape will be harder than finding an interface for a hard disk.
This is exactly the problem I faced recently when deciding whether or not to stick with tape backup.
Solution:
The next version of bacula will support volume migration, so I can migrate all my old data with minimal pain. Who cares if I can't find a drive for a 10 year old tape? I'll have migrated all the data to a newer one long before.
Don't know about your part of the world, but here in the UK, most if not all DVRs on the market are digital-only devices which get their programme guide from the digital signal. AFAICT, this is what TiVO are charging for - the "privilege" of your TiVO's serial number being on a list of "paid up users" so when it phones home to say "Hi, I'm serial number 123456789, can I have a programme guide?" the computer at the other end says "Yeah, sure, here you go" rather than "You haven't paid. Go away."
Make every 3+ year sentence come with mandatory castration.
Have you been reading Robert Rankin? One of his characters argued that criminal tendencies were genetic and proposed this as a solution, only it was roundly shouted down as not stopping them from committing further crime and the humanitarian aspects of compulsory sterilisation.
His solution was compulsory execution of all criminals.
Within a few years, it had worked a treat.
a civic planner with a fetish for roundabouts
Really? Ours have a fetish for traffic lights. On one 2-mile fairly straightforward drive I counted 18 sets, most of which didn't need to be there. Strangely, they always come up in January-March time, right at the end of the financial year.
Well, Gutmann is known in my circles for having done some good work, and having a track record that goes back for years.
Yeah, I noticed that it was written by someone who's known not to be a complete moron.
Myself, I am now beginning to wonder if it's worth rolling out Linux to the next round of desktops and using Terminal Services for any software which has to be Windows-run. Probably wind up cheaper anyhow.
Linux has a few advantages over Microsoft products. And licensing is one of the biggest advantages for the end user.
Don't underestimate that. If Microsoft start sic'ing their licensing dogs on more companies, it will become more of an issue.
The reason why is this: I've looked into the various licensing options and concluded that you aren't expected to understand them or comply with them. There's no way anyone could be reasonably expected to comply with licensing like that without seeking professional legal advice with every mouse click. The whole system is designed to set you up for failure, presumably so that if they send the BSA around for an audit, they're bound to find something that's not up to scratch.
Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape
So you either need a nice fast link to another site (fast enough to handle all the replication) or you need to accept that in the event of a disaster, you've lost your email system permanently.
Assuming you have such a link, you have to hope that nobody ever gets disgruntled, or your nice shiny replica will merrily replicate all the deleting they do.
Then you guess wrong. My partner has the same model and it's some ultra-thin proprietary connection.
And it doesn't charge off USB. I've plugged it directly into two computers and a powered USB hub, but no luck.
Except that at some point they changed the spec of the charger to supply a substantially higher voltage - the old type will still charge a newer phone, but a lot more slowly.
Confused the hell out of my brother who couldn't figure out why his nice shiny new phone had lousy battery life - he'd only ever charged it using the old charger and it had never had a proper full charge.
Is that so? Knew someone would be able to help me. Thanks!
The 64 bit version probably will be more RAM hungry. All that nice 64-bit goodness uses 64-bit pointers and 64-bit ints, thus needing twice the RAM for many of the more common data types.