On Sunday 18 March 2007, dustin AT zmanda DOT com wrote:
>On Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 08:15:30PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> If we had such a tool, I could run an estimate phase in advance of the
>> regular run and be in a position to reboot to the older kernel ahead
>> of time instead of totally screwing with the amanda database.
>
>I'm not sure that is the most compelling use-case! ;)

Well, given enough time I expect I could come up with more excuses. :)

>That said, it's always useful to be able to decompose operations for
>debugging purposes.  At this point, the system is not factored in such a
>way as to make that break a clean one.  I can think of ways to
>accomplish something *like* what you're asking, but they're all hacks
>that would be harder than
>
>  if [ $(ssh mybox uname -r) == "2.6.foo.bar" ]
>  then
>    echo "Please reboot mybox" | page_gene
>  fi

Well, I know that 2.6.21-rc1-rc2-rc3 are making tar look broken.  So if it 
screws up tonight, I go get the identically versioned but hand built 
tar-1.15-1 from my old FC2 install, nearly a megabyte in size, and move 
the tar-1.15-1 from the FC6 rpm install out of the way.  That one is only 
about 240k.  Mine is obviously staticly linked as its some over 830k in 
size.  If that won't work, and all the other file inspection tools all 
report sane dates and such, but tar still insists on backing up most of 
the 45GB I have here in one fell swoop when told to do a level 3 or 4,  
then tar is indeed broken and the bugzilla entry I made against it 3 days 
ago will get re-inforced with more data.  Considering that a vtape here 
is sized at about 11GB, there is no reason for amanda to tell it to 
backup 3x the data the tape will hold.

In this case, an amestimate utility would be handier than that famous 
button on the equally famous door.  I could time a run and see what it 
says, change something and repeat, and do it several times a day without 
screwing up amanda's database all that badly.

Thanks Dustin.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
What hath Bob wrought?