--On Thursday, April 17, 2003 16:31:17 +0200 Stefano Coletta <creator AT 
mindcreations DOT com> wrote:

Hello everybody,

I'm setting up Amanda to work as the global ISP solution for customers having 
to backup hosting/housing/spaces/servers.
I've conviced management that this software can be a great solution avoiding to 
purchase expensive softwares like Arcserve, Legato, Tivoli ecc.
Now, while implementing it, I had to deal with a limit of Amanda.
Customers have to pay to be backed up and thus I have to control the size of 
every backup client (aka disk).

In my case the customer is supposed to pay for a "tape quota"... for example, 
1Gb space for 3 installations.
I need a mechanism to control if the overall storage of customers' servers are 
hitting/exceeding the quota they have paid.

The 2 goals to achieve are:
1) to be informed about overflows in relation to every purchased customer quota 
and even to notify the customer
2) to effectively deny the backup if the client has exceeded his quota

 <<proposed Amanda modifications snipped>>

Personally, I think you are trying to enforce quotas in the wrong place.
 First, the amount of tape used is a function not only of the original
disk space used, but also your backup configuration (tapecycle, dumpcycle,
runspercycle, data churn rate, etc).
 Second, if a customer is over their quota, do you not back it up at all,
or only back up the quota amount (and how would you do that, truncate
the dump possibly rendering the entire backup worthless)?  If I were a
customer paying for X amount of backups and during an upgrade happened
to end up with 105% of X of data, needed to recover the next day but
found out it wasn't backed up, I would certainly not remain a customer.
 It seems to me that it would be much simpler to base your backup fees
on the amount of disk to be backed up and the desired frequency (daily,
weekly, whatever).  If you are really interested in charging for tape
space you could easily write a script to parse Amanda's reports and
automatically comment out DLEs if someone exceeds their quota for whatever
period of time is agreed on.

Frank



--
Frank Smith                                             fsmith AT hoovers DOT 
com
Systems Administrator                                  Voice: 512-374-4673
Hoover's Online                                          Fax: 512-374-4501