On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 09:09:34AM -0500, Bort, Paul wrote:

> > Perhaps I find the time to implement something like this in the next 
> > weeks...but to be honest before having a GUI for amanda I 
> > would prefer seeing a windows client *duck* :)

> No need to duck! Lots of people would like this, just search for 'SAMBA'
> in the mailing list archives. I looked at this "back in the day", and it
> breaks down to two parts: A tar clone that can backup and restore files
> under NT, and amandad. There are instructions for building amandad under
> Cygwin, and there was a SourceForge project for an AMANDA client that had
> (IIRC) 90% of a working NT tar, with ACLs. If you combine the two with a 
> little elbow grease, you could have a Windows client in an afternoon. If
> you need to do it without a full Cygwin installation, you could probably
> just copy the right files and registry entries out of an existing one. 
> (I know you can run Cygwin's ssh.exe with just one other DLL, I think it's
> cygwin1.dll.)

I have had recent exposure to this....

My employer seeks to provide "backup" services for clients, some
of whom evidently have data that they value enough for it to be
backed up, but so little that they have chosen to host it on a
Microsoft platform.  (Yes, I confess that I find this self-contradictory.)
And for many (most? all?) of such cases, placing the data on a
CIFS/SMB/Samba "share" is (apparently) not acceptable.

After seeing the price tag for a proprietary product that would support
both the systems I care about (FreeBSD) and the Microsoft environments
-- as well as seeing the ugly messages about data overruns from the
proprietary product (vs. the clean output in the logs from running
amanda) -- we decided to put a bit more effort into coercing the win32
amanda client to work.

It's our intent to put together some documentation telling how to make
this work (for some plausible definition of "work"), if that would be
useful.

But in the testing so far, we're finding some odd results:

* The actual program that the Win32 client uses to do the backups
  appears to be an NT port of tar.  But trying to restore a file
  made from that backup on a FreeBSD system generates a message saying
  that the file does not look like a tar archive.

  Also, "ls" showed each directory twice -- once as a directory; once as
  a regular file.

* Trying to use the "amrestore" on the Win32 side, the "ls" command
  doesn't seem to work.

At some point, I would like my employer to contribute some resources
toward making this version of the amanda client solid enough to install
from the directions and run.  This may include paying someone to
implement "selfcheck," for example, as well as other parts of the Win32
client that need attention.  Speaking only for myself, I would be less
interested in a GUI for any of this, but that's just me.

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill                                 david AT egation DOT com