On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 10:49:04PM +0200, Paul Bijnens wrote:
> But here you can always fall back to amrestore + ssh (or netcat)
> initiated from the server, without altering firewall rules.

Fair enough.

But all this is beside my original point, which was simply a
warning not to fall into the trap of assuming that "server" and
"listener" mean the same thing.  It's a natural mistake to make,
since colloquially, the words are often used interchangeably --
it's even true for simple cases like telnet and ssh -- but if you
try to think that way about Amanda, you'll get very confused....

Note that the code itself falls into this trap.  The function to
listen on a socket is called stream_server(), and the ones to
connect have names like stream_client(), which leads to the
silliness of the Amanda client calling stream_server and vice
versa.  If the functions were called stream_listener() and
stream_initiator(), things would be clearer.

Likewise docs/PORT.USAGE, which is a lot of why that document is
so brain-twisting:
    When Amanda creates a TCP server socket to listen for
    incoming connections (sendbackup) [...]
Geez!

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics AT telepres DOT com
|  |  /
The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that's why so
many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it's hard to
represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus.
        - Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum"