On Wednesday 01 January 2003 12:58, Kirk Strauser wrote:
>I'm using Amanda on a mixed network of Linux and FreeBSD machines.
> The default installation of Amanda on FreeBSD defines
> --with-user=operator and --with-group=operator . It occurs to me
> that I have many files that aren't world-readable. Can tar
> backup these files? Wouldn't it be running as operator and not
> root?
>
Theoreticly when amanda is running tar, its running it suid root.
I once thought that was suffucient until I needed to recover, and
discovered I had no index files in the backups, tar refuses to
backup a file with a lock on it. That seems to mean that anything
that happens to be running when amanda runs will not be archived
because that file will have a lock on it, so there is going to be
some missing stuff. Its probably not a showstopper because you'll
have the srcs or rpms to re-install those available during the
recovery, but it is more work. But in the case if the config and
data dirs amanda maintains, to discover at recovery time after a
crash that you don't have any index data, that was also a
showstopper.
So now I wait till all the other disklist entries are done, turn off
the indexing, and then grab the index and config stuffs so they are
the last 2 files on the tape, and they are uptodate except for
their own entries. That seems to work ok, but now being a bit
paranoid after having been snakebit once, I also tar those dirs and
store them someplace else on a different disk. I wrote a script to
manage that maintainance chore also.
>My disk devices are owned by operator, so using dump instead of
> tar should catch everything, but I'd been persuaded that dump is
> bad for backing up live filesystems on Linux and FreeBSD. Have I
> migrated away from that utility at the expense of skipping the
> non-world-readble files on my system, many of which are the most
> important files on my network?
--
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M
99.21% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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