???

Hey folks,

I'm curious about the way amanda backs up. If I'm reading the docs,list and other resources correctly, AMANDA requires at least 1 disklistentry per partition being backed up. It requires that you have a tapeper partition (not clear on this point as it would seem to obliviate theneed for a non-rewinding device).

Another part of my embattled mind is saying "no, don't be stupid! Itrequires 1 entry per partition (or directory) in the disklist file butwill append the backups as needed to the tape device until it can't puta particilar dump on it. It will then go to the next tape and start thefailed dump from the beginning."Which side is right (the wheat or frosted ;-) )? I don't know why I'mhaving so much trouble with this but I suspect it's information overload.

Also, I currently am using a 7 tape changer (which I think I have mtxtalking to nicely but with some small eccentricities). I currentlyhave it setup as follows:


dumpcycle 1 week
runspercycle 6
tapecycle 7 tapes
runtapes 1  #I'm thinking of upping this to 2 or 3
tpchanger "chg-scsi"    # not sure about this yet
tapedev "/dev/nst0"
rawtapedev "/dev/null"
changerdev "/dev/sg0"
tapetype EXB-EZ17

where EXB-EZ17 is defined by:

define tapetype EXB-EZ17 {
  comment "just produced by tapetype program"
  length 18600 mbytes
  filemark 623 kbytes
  speed 2137 kps
}

The current plan is to set up the backups to run 1 full per week withincrementals (yes, I know amanda does her own thing). There arecurrently three 7-tape containers available which I plan to use to allowoff-site store for 1 container in rotation.Any input would be greatly appreciated. This is running Amanda 2.4.3b3on a Slackware 8.1 OS using tar (not dump). I configured the build touse /home/amanda/bin/tar (which is currently just a copy of tar butcould easily become a wrapper). I followed Gene's advice and mademyself a build script (since I found myself building and rebuilding as Icame across new material). It's as follows:


#!/bin/sh
# Since I'm always forgetting to build it as the amanda user
if [ `whoami` != 'amanda' ]; then
       echo
       echo "WARNING!!!!"
       echo "AMANDA needs to be configured and built by the amanda user,"
       echo "but must be installed by root."
       echo
       exit 1
fi
make clean
rm -f config.status config.cache
./configure --prefix=/home/amanda \
           --libdir=/usr/local/lib/amanda \
           --mandir=/usr/local/man \
           --with-user=amanda \
           --with-group=disk \
           --with-config=daily \
           --with-configdir=/home/amanda/config \
           --with-gnutar=/home/amanda/bin/tar \
           --with-gnutar-listdir=/home/amanda/var \
           --with-changer-device=/dev/sg0 \
           --with-tape-device=/dev/nst0 \
           --with-amandahosts \
           --with-gnu-ld \
           --with-db=db \
           --with-debugging=/tmp/amanda-dbg

# Create directories that aren't created by make
if [ ! -d /home/amanda/var ]; then
       mkdir /home/amanda/var
fi

if [ ! -d /home/amanda/config ]; then
       mkdir /home/amanda/config
fi


=G=