On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 03:26:39PM -0500, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> Anyone out there running amanda on a 386 or 486 with 16M of ram?

Not any more, but I did in 1995 or thereabouts :-)  486-DX33 (or
was it a DX2/66?) with 16 whole megabytes worth of 30-pin SIMMs.

It turned out that (a) that wasn't enough RAM, and (b) FreeBSD
2.0.5's low-memory robustness left a fair amount to be desired,
as I discovered a few times when I came in in the morning to find
the backup server down, and the /var partition, where the holding
disk was, thoroughly trashed.

(It also turns out that FreeBSD still supports the *3*86 -- last
month's 4.9 release contains a bug fix for it.  I imagine Linux
still does too.  Both are equally gratifying...)

I think the Amanda version was 2.2.6 -- just saw that mentioned
near the beginning of the ChangLog, and it rings a bell.
Interesting limitations (some from memory, some from ChangeLog;
some probably incorrect):
  - No changer support.  One tape per run; that's it, that's all.
  - No indexing, no amrecover.  Amrestore would pull dumps off
    the tape, but from there you were strictly on your own.
  - No gnutar; it was strictly dump.
  - No "reserve".  Effectively, it was hard-wired to 100%.
  - No "runspercycle".
  - No chunked dumps on holding disk.
  - No promote_hills() in the planner.  If you missed a tape
    (e.g. for a holiday), causing that night's full dumps to be
    postponed, they'd have a strong tendency to stay clumped
    together with the next night's full dumps for a long time, at
    least on a small network like the one I was responsible for.
  - Blair Zajac's extensive patch set hadn't yet been merged into
    the canonical sources.  If you wanted them, you had to
    download and apply them yourself.
    
I don't believe Jean-Louis was involved yet (from the ChangeLog,
runspercycle and chunked dumps were among his early patches); I'm
not even sure that (the long-departed) Alexandre Oliva and John
R. Jackson were around back then.

Truth be told, I think Amanda was rather moribund at the time
(hence the existence of BZ's patches in the first place); ISTR
that it was Alexandre who woke the project up again.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics AT telepres DOT com
|  |  /
It must be said that they would have sounded better if the singer
wouldn't throw his fellow band members to the ground and toss the
drum kit around during songs.
        - Patrick Lenneau