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Re: gnutar in configure
2004-03-02 15:51:08
If you're backing up more than one architecture, I find that it's nice
to set things up so that you can have the same path to gnutar on all of
the architectures. That way, you can run amrecover on any machine and
it will find a valid path to gnutar. Normally, I just create a symbolic
link to the "real" path to gnutar in /usr/local/etc/amanda/bin and use
--with-gnutar=/usr/local/etc/amanda/bin/tar If you're only backing up
one architecture, and this suggestion causes a brain hemmorhage, then
forget about it and just stick to what you were doing.
Maybe it seems a bit esoteric, but in practice I have found it to be
very useful. Very often, I have restored files for an IRIX workstation
to the holding disk of the amanda server, which is Linux, and then pick
and choose which files I really want to transfer to the workstation with
rsync, rather than just restoring everything to the IRIX workstation
directly. That way, I can be careful not to overwrite files, or force
overwriting corrupt files with newer timestamps, whatever it is that I
need to do. I think it gives me an extra level of control to help avoid
making a mistake.
On another note, maybe things have changed, but I once found that gnutar
incremental backups sucked performance-wise, would make machines pretty
much unusable during estimates and dumps. Normally, this would not
matter, but you're talking University with eccentric grad students
working at 3am and such who complain about these things. I have
migrated most things to XFS filesystem and use xfsdump on Linux and
IRIX--a process that I started when XFS went Open Source (around Red Hat
7.0) and I got tired of waiting for the problems with dump for ext2fs to
get sorted out. Machines are still very usable with xfsdump and
software compression running in the background, and finish faster than
gnutar dumps. xfsdump estimates are very fast, comparatively speaking.
However, with faster CPUs, faster disk interfaces, and filesystems like
Rieserfs, perhaps the performance of gnutar has improved.
--jonathan
Frank Smith wrote:
Then you can run configure --with-gnutar=/usr/local/bin/tar, and make
sure that that path exists on your clients, and is gnu tar of the
proper version on all of them as well.
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