I thought I would add my 2 cents worth since I have just completed the
installation of Amanda, Samba, and other assorted gnu and freeware
products. My configuation is 2 Sun servers (Solaris 9), L25 Tape
Library w/ 2 LTO tape drives, 2 T3 SANs, and 22 Windows NT/2K servers.
---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 11:42:40 -0400 (EDT)
> From: "mitchbnj_removethis AT excite DOT com" <faslink AT excite DOT com>
>Subject: lurk mode off...amanda time-frame question
>
>
>Q on amt of time to implement amanda?!
>
>After chatting with my manager, I have to ask the list a bunch of
>painfully obvious questions:
>
>1) How long should it take someone to get amanda up and running. (5
>minutes, 5 days, 5 weeks?)
Maybe I'm slow, OK, I'm slow. But it took me 2 weeks to install all of
the pre-requisite gnu products, Amanda, Samba, and mtx (for the
changer). I took me another two weeks to get the configs correct for
the changer to work properly and to 'play' with it to get the best
possible options for the backups to work in certain time constraints
that I have to work with. During the installation and testing phases I
also encountered hardware problems (LTO tape drives, and a bad disk
drive in the T3 SAN). I also had to deal with a bad copy of gnutar, and
some problems with Amanda compiling correctly with Solaris 9.
>2) How much of what is required by amanda, compared to buying a
>commercial product? i.e., is much of the configuration work that I've
>done in Amanada "magically" done by commercial programs?
I've worked with Netbackup and Networker at another shop and both
products took about 2 weeks to get into production from the initial
installation. Lot of time spent in setting up for doing the backups
of several servers to a single unix server and working with new
hardware. It seems if a changer is involved this just takes longer to
do the setups.
>3) have any of you (I hope, please help me...) configured any
>competing commercial products, and is it simpler?/Faster?
See above.
>4) Is it just me who needs my head examined?
No, with the tight budgets these days, especially in education, someone
needs to make a decision as to freeware or buy. If you have the
money then I would say to buy and at least you have the comfort level
of having regular maintenance and support (1-800 call) if you run into
problems. I will say that the support from the Amanda listserv is
great and very helpful. But if something does not work, the
responsibility falls on your shoulders to make it work.
>5) does it sound to you (too) that I need to find another job?
No, again. Must be patient. I've often wondered why the newer techs
of today must have everything working after the CD-ROM installs the
software for them. I've been around since they called it DP
(data processing for the new guys). I've always tried to plan before
doing any installation. This usually will save a lot of time in the
long run (not always, I said usually).
>My boss (after thinking this has been painless *) has complained that
>I told her it would take a week to get the system up and running with
>backups.
>Of course the guy who was doing backups before (he gave them to me to
>do last week) was taking 4 hrs every friday afternoon to copy files
>to his pc and cut 4 CDROMS. but he had PHYSICAL media, which she
>likes. **
This reminds me of Dilbert material. But there is something to be said
for having physical media that can be taken offsite for disaster
recovery purposes. I personally think that doing backups to disk for speed is
fine as long as you can eventually get it to some type of
portable media for offsite storage if nothing else.
>So I gave the following schedule to my boss, which she grudgingly
>accepted:
>Monday:, perform direct hardware backups to tape, restore, test
>copied ok both ways.
>Tuesday: install, compile software, get installed software correctly
>running on server,
>test backup of server
>Wednesday:, install client software (on another server), test backup
>from server.
>Thursday: adjust # tapes, scheduling information. Add more
>clients
>Friday :installing SAMBA on server, setting up drive share
>so that it's accessible to tape system for backups.
>
<snip>
>
Try explaining to a new manager/director why you have over 3,000 round
reel and tape cartridges for your mainframe going back to 1973.
Especially, if they've never been around mainframes before. The reason
we had so many tape is for archival purposes and also when mainframe
disks use to cost $44K each you used tapes for temporary or work storage
for your applications.
Good luck!
Bob...
--
Robert Zahn UNIX Systems Administrator
Oklahoma City Community College
7777 S. May Avenue
Oklahoma City, Ok 73159
bzahn AT zeus.okccc DOT edu bzahn AT okccc DOT edu
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