On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 03:38:40PM +0100, Claus Rosenberger wrote:
> hi,
> 
> i need to use star instead of gnutar because i want to backup my acl's
> too. how could i manage this?
> 

There are several things called "star".
I'm guessing that you mean the program written by Jörg Schilling.

Several people have considered and/or attempted to use this archiver.
I don't recall anyone reporting back on their success.

The basic approach is to use a "wrapper" for the real gnutar program.
The wrapper is a shell script that takes the gnutar arguments and
options that amanda uses, converts them to the options and arguments
star wants, and then calls star rather than gnutar.

When you compile amanda you configure it with the option "--with-gnutar="
(check the actual option, my memory may falter) set to point to a
copy of a normally valid gnutar (version 1.13.25 recommended).  Make
it a copy as it will be replaced and you don't want anything but amanda
to use this "tar".  I happen to use /usr/local/libexec/amgtar.  In the
following I'll call the copy "amgtar".

Get amanda running with the amgtar copy of a real gnutar.

Replace amgtar with a shell script that does nothing but call the real
gnutar.  I do this by renaming amgtar to amgtar.real and then naming
the shell script amgtar.  A first shell script can be as simple as

   exec <path to amgtar.real> "$@"

Sometimes for analysis I put in a logging line before the exec.

   LogFile=<path to where you want the log>

   date >> $LogFile
   echo "$@" >> $LogFile

Should you want the arguments spread out and numbered you might
replace the echo with:

    for arg
    do
        echo "$arg"
    done | cat -n >> $LogFile

Make sure you do some recovers and restores as well before switching
to star.

Armed with the results of the above analysis and/or the argument
lists from the amanda debug files in /tmp/amanda/runtar...  determine
what needs converting, deleting, adding, ... to make star do the
samething that gnutar does.  Don't worry about your acl's yet.
Write a script to do the converstion that in the end "exec's star"
rather than amgtar.real.  Again, dumps and recovers.

Then you can add your star-specific options to save and restore acl's
and test again.

The final item is to report back your success to the list.  I'd like to
use JS's star as it has the ability on Solaris, to not change the atime
or the ctime during backup.

jl
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)