Gene Heskett wrote:

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.

see above...

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.

Actually need to change this to either chg-mtx or chg-zd-mtx...

rawtapedev "/dev/null"

comment this one

Roger, wilco.

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.

not exactly sure how...yet.

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.