Gene made some points but not all I agree with.

Friendly user interface (not necessary "fancy" GUI) is a measure of all
good quality software products. Amanda is not beyond the scope of this
view.
 
Amanda is client-server based product. This means, while its client
might be in "bare" OS, amanda server is not. The server has to be fully
functioning to provide the data recovering/restoring service. 

In terms of management of amanda, I appreciate all efforts that have
been put into the product to make it less demanding for human
intervention however, it is still a client/server architecture involving
many resources and objects. Initial configuration, though one time,
takes some time. The difficulty of getting used to it has been reflected
in this mailing list. For a changing (amount of data, schedule, tape
devices) environment, managing amanda does not seem to be a piece of
cake. As far as I am concerned, Bernd's presented a good question if we
look at it as a bigger picture rather than as a stupid question from a
lazy and less knowledgeable admin.

I am not initiating a fire. Forgive me if it would irritate some of you.


Thomas 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
[mailto:owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org] On Behalf Of Gene Heskett
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2003 3:44 PM
To: Bernd Broermann; amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Subject: Re: Frontend , UI for amanda ?

On Wed February 12 2003 05:35, Bernd Broermann wrote:
>Hello,
>
>Do you know of a UI Frontend for AMNANDA ?
>
>I mean a shell, perl, python script ,
>which is an menu driven program to lable
>recover , manage the backups.
>
>Thanks
>Bernd

AFAIK, nobody ever got around to doing one of those, mainly because 
when you need to recover, the likelyhood of haveing that fancy gui 
available is somewhere between nil and .00zip.  In that event you 
are expected to get your fingernails a bit dirty running tar or 
dump because a recovery can be largely done with nothing more than 
a bare bones os (re-)install that includes tar (or uhgg, dump), 
gzip, mt to manipulate the drive and dd to extract the data.

Anything else is eye candy.  Nothing from amanda is required to do a 
recover although there are those utils for a fully functioning 
system.

As far as managing the backups, thats the job of a user 'amanda's 
crontab entry and how the various configuration files are built.  
It doesn't need any management, and if you try to force your ideas 
on amanda, you're just making life difficult for one heck of a good 
backup utility.

There are even those here who, if you insist on doing it your way, 
would rather you used some other utility designed for human 
intervention.  Amanda is not, although she can take gentle nudges 
and hints from time to time via modifications to the config files 
once you get to know her...

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
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Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.