Hello,
On Wednesday 03 February 2010 13:19:52 Alex Ehrlich wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Having played around with Bacula since 2.4.1 I would dare to express my
> general impressions here.
Yes, all opinions are welcome. However, you seem to have forgotten three
critical items:
1. This is an Open Source project that counts on contributions from the
community.
2. I have been working on Bacula for over 10 years now, devoting 100% of my
working time to it, often 12 hours a day 6 days a week -- all free.
3. As project manager, I am accutely aware of the deficiencies you point out.
Were I a superman, I would correct them all, but I try to juggle my time
between fixing known bugs, implementing new code, working with developers,
designing new features, and fixing some of the obvious deficiencies.
The primary solution to all the problems you mention is more participation
from the community. I am not at all complaining (maybe I should). I am in
fact very happy for the enormous number of contributions users have already
made, and I very patiently wait for additional contributions :-)
>
> Bacula has been known as "not too easy to deploy and configure" for long
> time and it is this fact that slows down Bacula's adoption around the
> world. There are also great fragments in the documentation and howtos,
> but much more are needed.
>>From what I have heard, Bacula is very easy to install compared to other open
source and other commercial backup programs. It is a big program, and has a
lot of features, so it can be overwelming at the beginning.
I am not sure what you mean by great "fragments" I suppose you mean holes, and
surely the documentation can be much improved, but I get enormous numbers of
complements on it when users compare it to other open source products -- if
you want to compare it TSM, then well, our 800 pages of documentation looks
pretty poor and unorganized.
>
> Generally, providing a broader set of ready-made packages (more
> platforms supported) would also increase the product market penetration,
> I believe. So the "set up qt 4.3.4 exactly" does sound
> "counterproductive" ;-) IMO.
We count on users such as yourself to build the packages. I don't personally
build them. I agree having more packages would increase the market
penetration, but I must live (and am happy) with what we do have.
>
> Specifically about bat, maybe it is worth building bat static with
> "suitable qt libraries" if it is technically possible? I understand that
> it would result into pretty large binaries.
Generally, with the exception of Windows, we do not release binaries -- it
takes a big organization to do so. We do have volunteers who build Bacula
binararies on many platforms (thank you guys and gal very much). They do
build an release a bat that works on their platform.
If you are interested in building a static bat that will work on any platform,
I suspect that a number of users would find it useful.
>
> Just some examples of documentation points that would be worth improving:
> * How is it reasonable to manage backup of laptops (that can be present
> or missing in the LAN throughout a day)?
> * What is a reasonable to-disk-only backup strategy? There is one
> example in the documentation but it is still pretty much tape-oriented.
> * How can I construct a fileset that contains the following files in
> "DOS wildcard notation": "C:/Documents and Settings/*/Local
> Settings/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/*", i.e. "for all
> users, back up whatever is under Firefox Profiles", but nothing extra?
> It is not so trivial.
> * How can I make a "virtual full" *easily*? (in 3.0, it required another
> pool etc, but actually it should have been "easy" for the administrator
> instead; there is improvement in 5.0, but still no "easy description").
> * Installation of the database (postgres) user fails under root by
> default, at least on rhel (there is no such database user defined by
> default), one should understand postgresql a little at least to get over
> the issue.
> * ... add according to your taste.
Those are good points and would make good contributions.
>
> Concerning Bacula Systems' product (i.e. one meant to be *slod* -- in
> contrast to free/open Bacula),
You apparently have not been reading what I have written about Bacula Systems.
Unlike most all other Open Source projects with a commercial arm (RedHat not
included) Bacula Systems has no "product" for sale. Bacula Systems, provides
support, training, consulting, and funded development.
All code that is developed by Bacula Systems, goes back into the community
version. Bacula Systems does have an Enterprise version of Bacula, but
unlike other so called Open Source companies (RedHat not included), our
Enterprise source code is available to everyone (you just have to register
and ask for it). In addition, in general the Enterprise version lags behind
the community version -- i.e. it has less features not more. However, it is
more stable and thus more suitable for enterprise use.
You should know that since Bacula Systems has come into existence, instead of
having only one full time programmer (me), there are now two full time
programmers plus two other part time programmers. If the current trend of
corporate interest continues to improve, there will be more over time. All
the code that is developed is available to the community.
> let us consider an example of MS Windows
> clients -- what's missing from the "ease of use" point of view. Current
> binary installers are .exe files and to get through in
> somewhat-bigger-than-soho scenarios MSI installers are required.
> Installer should support silent deployment or, at least (if we admit
> that bacula configuration files have to be unique for each client),
> proper silent upgrade. The current exe does allow silent upgrade from
> 3.0.2 to 3.0.3a with an *undocumented* switch "/S" on Windows XP -- but
> that's all. No silent/auto upgrade on Vista/W7, as I understand, no
> supported silent upgrade to 5.0.0 (configuration file locations
> changed), no bacula-fd service auto-recovery settings. Failure to back
> up efs-encrypted files (that is not reflected in documentation; yes,
> warnings come in the process of backup, but...) will probably cost lots
> to the company (if the customers discover this issue themselves --
> attempting to recover after disaster, or, in the best case, just after
> buying the product but before a disaster).
Again, Bacula Systems does not sell a "product" as you imply.
> No Vista+ "tray icon" is more a cosmetic issue here.
I am very aware of these issues with the exception of the "undocumented" /S
option, which if it exists must be some NSIS installer supported option,
which would of course be documented in their documentations.
All I can say is: what do you expect from a community project where I am
doing the development pretty much alone (there have been a number of
excellent contributions to the Windows versions), and just to test it, I have
to go out and purchase Microsoft licenses? In addition, to get good info
about Microsoft, you really need to become a member of MSDN, which costs.
I am not complaining, but the financial contributions to the company (much
appreciate for those who have done so) have not even covered 1/4 of my
personal out of pocket expenses. I repeat, I am not complaining, but simply
explaining the reality of the situation -- backup is critical but no one
wants to pay for it if you can get it free and few contribute to it because
most sys admins don't program and those that do don't consider it very sexy
to work on a backup program.
>
> The lower we can get the administrator's entry level the wider adoption
> can Bacula achieve -- resulting into more corporate customers get it in
> (not only directly but also via "advices of others" -- since the
> "others" would become larger). Steep learning curve is no good (although
> there were lots of old-style-unix/linux "gurus" that believed it *was* ;-).
I am quite content with how well Bacula has be received and adopted. You
might be very surprised to know how many *very* big corporations are using
it. As you can imagine, they want everything that you have mentioned and
more and are in general willing to pay for it -- with Bacula Systems and a
bit of time, continuing support from the community, and now more serious
corporate use of Bacula, I think we will see lots of improvements.
Best regards,
Kern
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Alex Ehrlich
>
> On 03.02.2010 12:57, Kern Sibbald wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > Bat:
> >
> > We have received a number of problem reports and bugs about building and
> > running bat, and unfortunately our documentation was insufficient, which
> > is hopefully now corrected.
> >
> > Bat is built with the Qt packages for doing the GUI. I have worked with a
> > lot of different GUI packages (Sun/Solaris, Mac, Windows, OS/2,
> > wxWidgits, X, Qt3, Qt4, ...) and I prefer Qt4 over all the other ones.
> > However, it is very version dependent, which is a bit of a pain. As a
> > consequence, the only way to get a stable working version of Bat is to
> > build it on the version of Qt where we have built and tested it. That
> > version is Qt 4.3.4 (default on Ubuntu 8.04).
> >
> > So to get bat to build correctly, we have released a depkgs-qt that
> > contains the source code for Qt 4.3.4, and if you are trying to build
> > Bat, either you should load the Qt 4.3.4 binaries on your system, or
> > download our depkgs-qt release from Source Forge and built Qt 4.3.4
> > there. Building from depkgs-qt does not install Qt on your system, it is
> > just used in the Bat build.
> >
> > We have updated the manuals (5.0.0 and 5.1.x-development) on the web site
> > to have more detailed instructions on building Bat. Hopefully this will
> > resolve any and all problems you may be having.
> >
> > Sorry for the inconvenience.
> >
> > Please see:
> >
> > http://www.bacula.org/5.0.x-manuals/en/main/main/Installing_Bacula.html#S
> >ECTION001250000000000000000
> >
> > for details.
> >
> > ==============================
> >
> > ActionOnPurge: --- Please do not use!!!
> >
> > Action on purge is a new directive in 5.0.0, which permits automatically
> > truncating your volumes with the volume is purged. Unfortunately, this
> > new code is not very robust and in some cases can lead to problems. We
> > strongly recommend that you avoid using this directive.
> >
> > We are rewriting the implementation for version 5.0.1 where it will be a
> > very useful feature.
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Kern
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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