Bacula-users

Re: [Bacula-users] Howto recover from a job being rerun around a summer time change

2009-04-07 20:46:27
Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Howto recover from a job being rerun around a summer time change
From: Mark V <mvyver AT gmail DOT com>
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 11:40:34 +1100
On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 5:23 AM, Martin Simmons <martin AT lispworks DOT com> 
wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:45:54 +0200, Foo  said:
>>
>> On Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:41:52 +0200, Martin Simmons <martin AT lispworks DOT 
>> com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >>>>>> On Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:34:09 +0200, Foo  said:
>> >>
>> >> The best solution would be for Bacula to translate time to UTC
>> >> internally
>> >> for scheduling, everything external such as logfiles, scheduling stanzas
>> >> in config etc. would remain in the user's locale.
>> >
>> > That doesn't help, because saying 2:05am local time in the config file is
>> > still ambiguous if the local time moves backwards by 1 hour at 3:00am.
>>
>> Not really, UTC remains the same on DST changes, so internal events using
>> UTC should be fine.
>>
>> Basically on startup Bacula needs to check the locale, get the offset from
>> UTC, if any, and set its internal clock to UTC, and change the offset on
>> DST changes. Then use the offset for calculations involving configs/user
>> output like logging.
>
> Doing all of those calculations doesn't solve the underlying problem, which is
> that the user has entered ambiguous data by saying "run this at 2:05am local
> time today."  On the day of the DST change, there is no unique UTC for 2:05am
> local time -- it might occur twice or not at all.
>
> The problem is what should 2:05am mean in that case?  E.g. is it 2 hours after
> midnight or 10 hours before midday?
>
> The code gets even more non-trivial when you also need to deal with clock
> adjustment as well.  See the first half of cron_tick in
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/usr.sbin/cron/cron/cron.c?rev=1.20
> for example.
>

Hi group, thanks for all the suggestions.

To be clear. I am very happy with how Bacula has worked, and continues
to work.
I installed Bacula because I'd seen several reviews pointing to it as
the most feature full.  It took a attempts to get my head around how
it works (the three services), so I wanted to make sure I wasn't
missing a known workaround or configuration whereby this would not
happen.

I should have said at the outset:
 - I am running Bacula locally; all 3 services, on my laptop.  So the
'change your system time to UTC' is not really an option.  Over the
week end I'm about to introduce a friend to linux and this wouldn't go
down well.  I'll set their backup to run shortly before midnight - in
a single laptop installation it isn't a problem to exclude a few hours
from the backup window.

One thing I had thought was it might be nice to have a 'forgiving'
option whereby:
 - If a job file exists with the same scheduled time as the job that
wants to run, i.e. the same jobs wants to run again, and the earlier
job ran without error, then Bacula issues a (loud) warning, and
carries on to the next job, but it doesnot block all further jobs.

Not sure if this is possible?

If you want some more details about the configuration that led to this
I'm happy to post the sections you are interested in.

Is there a way to submit feature requests?  Or is this list it?

When I get a few minutes I'll post, in a separate email, the error
messages I saw, and where, which had me scratching my heads for a long
time about what was stopping Bacula from running its jobs.

HTH

Mark

> __Martin
>
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