Re: [Bacula-users] confused about differentials

On 13.05.2015 18:45, Ian Young wrote:

On 13 May 2015, at 17:13, Kern Sibbald <kern AT sibbald DOT com> wrote:

We have never had any version of Bacula in which Differential backups were incomplete.

That's really good to know, thanks for the confirmation.

Running with a FD that is more recent that the Dir and the SD or a Dir and SD that are not identical is a big problem. Until that is fixed it doesn't make much sense to speculate about any odd behavior.

I have addressed that yesterday by rolling out the rawhide backports Alex Domoradov linked to (thanks, Alex!). So everything is now 5.2.13 except for some Debian-derived systems whose FDs are 5.2.6, which sounds like it wouldn't be a problem.

No, it will not be a problem. First older FDs are permitted, but in addition, in general (unless I make a programming error), all 5.2.x FDs have the same protocol.

I'm going to force a full dump on all clients over the next day or so, and then monitor from there. It will be a couple of weeks with the current configuration before I will be able to conclude that things are OK.

OK. Good move to start with Full backups.

Also, if you are doing something very unusual in your FileSet or using multiple FileSets in your backup, there could be a configuration problem or perhaps even an undiscovered bug,

I have multiple FileSets (one per OS variant, essentially), but any given client only ever uses one. I'm hoping that's not "very unusual".

That is perfectly fine and normal.

but the first thing to do is correct any possible version problems you have.

I'm curious; does the Dir have programmatic access to the FD's version number (I know it's in "status client" but that might just be text)? Seems like if this is as vital as you describe, it would be better to error out if it was newer.

I consider it a security violation to pass a version number as it permits a hacker to know exactly what weaknesses the other end may have. However good (secure) that philosophy may be, I have learned that it is much more difficult to maintain compatibility with older FDs if the Dir and the SD do not know the exact versions, so newer Bacula's pass much more complete information and the next community version (hopefully in July) will even include more than just the version.

Unfortunately, recently, I used the same version information in a more advanced Enterprise version that was used in the community version leading to a few unwanted incompatibilities between the Enterprise and the community new features. In future versions this will be definitively resolved.

Cheers,
Kern

Cheers,

-- Ian

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