On Monday 09 September 2002 16:39, Galen Johnson wrote:
>Hey folks,
>
This is wheat
>  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 disklist entry per partition being backed up.  It
> requires that you have a tape per partition (not clear on this
> point as it would seem to obliviate the need for a non-rewinding
> device).
>
and this is frosted
>Another part of my embattled mind is saying "no, don't be stupid!
> It requires 1 entry per partition (or directory) in the disklist
> file but will append the backups as needed to the tape device
> until it can't put a particilar dump on it.  It will then go to
> the next tape and start the failed dump from the beginning."
>
>Which side is right (the wheat or frosted ;-) )?  I don't know why
> I'm having so much trouble with this but I suspect it's
> information overload.

Frosted :-)

>Also,  I currently am using a 7 tape changer (which I think I have
> mtx talking to nicely but with some small eccentricities).   I
> currently have it setup as follows:
>
>dumpcycle 1 week
>runspercycle 6
>tapecycle 7 tapes
You'll prefer to have at least 2x dumpcycle*runspercycle tapes in 
the rotation if you think about the ramifications of overwriting 
your last full backup and having it fail for some reason.  Plus a 
few spares on the shelf of course :-)

>runtapes 1  #I'm thinking of upping this to 2 or 3
You can, but probably won't need to if the tapes are properly sized, 
the proper sizing being that a tape must be capable of holding any 
one disklist entry with room enough for a few incrementals too.

>tpchanger "chg-scsi"    # not sure about this yet
>tapedev "/dev/nst0"
This if you're going to use chg-scsi, will turn into the config 
number you use out of a multi-config bearing chg-scsi.conf file.

>rawtapedev "/dev/null"
comment this one

>changerdev "/dev/sg0"
This is whatever your dmesg file idents it as.

>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
> with incrementals (yes, I know amanda does her own thing).  There
> are currently three 7-tape containers available which I plan to
> use to allow off-site store for 1 container in rotation.

amanda should know each tape as a unique identifier, so the 
recomendations above then become at least 3x plus spares, not 2x.  
Label them all sequentially.  Put a cleaning tape in the last slot 
of each magazine, and if you're carefull, only using one tape a 
night, you can stay with a set day of the week to change the 
magazines, just be sure after changing the magazine that you do an 
"amtape /config/ reset" so she knows shes back to slot 1.

As you build the disklist, do it incrementally so that she won't try 
and do more than one tapes worth of level 0's on any one nightly 
run.
 
>Any input would be greatly appreciated.  This is running Amanda
> 2.4.3b3 on a Slackware 8.1 OS using tar (not dump).  I configured
> the build  to use /home/amanda/bin/tar (which is currently just a
> copy of tar but could easily become a wrapper).  I followed
> Gene's advice and made myself a build script (since I found
> myself building and rebuilding as I came 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

Love it, can I steal it?

>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=

Looks good with the above caveats.  Welcome to the amanda world.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.14% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly