On Friday 03 March 2006 11:07, gil naveh wrote:
>Hi,
>
>
>
>We have Amanda backing up our Solaris servers for about a year. So far
> we are very happy with Amanda.
>
>Recently I was requested to use Amanda to backup some of our Window
> server.
>
>In order to do so, I have to configure Amanda with Smbclient.
>
>Does it mean that I have do - reconfigure + make + make install from
> start - or is there another way more graceful to add the Smbclient
> configuration to Amanda.

If you still have the src's that should be easy enough.  You did use a 
script to configure it originally I hope?  I have for years, so 
installing each new snapshot as it is released is a 10 minute job job 
here, worst case. I've even posted that script here a few times, a 
search of the list archive should spit it out.  But I switched to 
vtapes about a year ago, so my script got simplified.

OTOH, if not, you may want to consider doing it in two steps if there is 
room for the windows data available on the solaris drives, one could do 
an rsync of the windows stuff first, and then backup the local version.

Samba doesn't handle ctimes well, so you'll quite often get level 0 
backups every night on files that have not changed.  rsync'd versions 
of a file will not be updated if there has been no change to the 
original, but this is not determined from file dates, rsync uses crc 
checksums to determine changes.  If a change has occurred the new 
version is kept and the old one deleted as it works.

Therefore amanda incrementals work with the exception that if a change 
has occurred the whole file is new and therefore gets a level 0.  This 
is usually better than samba doing a level 0 of nearly everything in 
most cases.

Also, for recovery, rsync is quite easily reversable.  We've been doing 
rsync only for several machines at the tv station and its worked rather 
nicely, with hardware failure recoveries often recovered the same day 
if good hardware is on the shelf.  We run rsync into day of week 
directories on a big raid so we can back up before the onset of a drive 
failure to recover.

>Many thanks,
>
>Gil

-- 
Cheers Gil, Gene
People having trouble with vz bouncing email to me should add the word
'online' between the 'verizon', and the dot which bypasses vz's
stupid bounce rules.  I do use spamassassin too. :-)
Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above
message by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.