All,

The August Monthly Status Update is available on the wiki at
  http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Monthly_Status_Updates/August_2007
As always, feedback and comments are welcome and encouraged.

August was a quiet month for public Amanda development, as Zmanda engineers 
continued work on a number of large changes such as the Device API and 
Application API and prepared for further architectural refactoring. 

Wiki Changes

* Tfinn added a wishlist entry about native mirroring of backups to multiple 
storage media. At the moment this is only possible using RAIT, which has some 
drawbacks.
* Choogendyk added a new tapetype entry for Sony AIT-5 400GB tapes.
* Paddy made minor changes to the No index records for host-disk article. 

Zmanda Forums

This month the team provided forums support to lots of new users. Especial 
thanks to Andrew Rakowski for his community contributions. In total, 
Jean-Louis Martineau, Sachin Kale, Dustin Mitchell, Pavel Pragin, Sunil 
Sawant, Paddy Sreenivasan, and Kevin Till all helped out.

amanda-users mailing list

This list exists primarily for support, and there was lots of it this month. 
The supporters were unusually diverse this time, with over 20 contributors, 
including Joshua Baker-LePain, Paul Bijnens, Brian Cuttler, Gene Haskett, 
Patrick M. Hausen, Chris Hoogendyk, Matt Hyclak, Aaron Grier, Jon Labadie, 
Jay Lessert, Jean-Francois Malouin, Dustin J. Mitchell, Marc Muehlfeld, Steve 
Newcomb, Charlie Reitsma, Donald Ritchey, Mario Silva, Frank Smith, Mauricio 
Tavares, Skylar Thompson, Greg Troxel, Geert Uytterhoeven, and Stefan G. 
Weichinger. Kai Zimmer

In addition, Mitch Collinsworth, Chris Hoogendyk and Jon LaBadie discussed a 
way to integrate client initiated backup. This discussion went on in parallel 
on the amanda-hackers list, below.

amanda-hackers mailing list

The discussion on client initated backup started by Mitch Collinsworth on the 
amanda-users list continued here, with additional contributions by Greg 
Troxel and Dustin J. Mitchell. Dustin suggested that this might be a good 
Google Summer of Code project. Additional wishlist discussions on mirroring 
and scheduling were led by and contributed from Paul Bijnens, Aaron J. Grier, 
Chris Hoogendyk, Matt Hyclak, Jon Labadie, Jean-Louis Martineau, Christopher 
McCrory, Marc Mengal, Dustin J. Mitchell and Frank Smith. At this time, 
however, none of these discussions had led to a patch.

Dustin J. Mitchell started a discussion thread on the use of threads in 
Amanda. He wanted to know if it was OK to require threading support in future 
versions of Amanda. At the end of the month, the discussion was still 
ongoing, but an emerging consensus appeared to support mandatory threads as 
long as the threaded code was well-tested, optional on the client, and it 
remains possible to perform a manual restore without thread support. 
Dissenting voices included Aaron J. Grier, who expressed doubts that threads 
were a useful development paradigm at all and dismay at introducing new 
library dependencies, and Marc W. Mengel, who was uncertain about the 
permanence of threading APIs and skeptical about threaded restores on very 
old hardware.

Although the amanda-hackers list is primarily about development, there was 
additionally some user support provided by Jean-Louis Martineau, Dustin J. 
Mitchell and Greg Troxel.

Code Changes

Only a few very small fixes were committed to the repository:

* Satya Ganga fixed server-src/amcleanup.sh.in so as to be compatible with 
bash 2.03 on Solaris 8.
* Terry Burton contributed a new A4 label template for DLT tapes.
* C R Ritson submitted a patch to integrate amverifyrun.sh with the same 
locking paradigm used by amdump and amflush.
* Dustin J. Mitchell made a number of changes:
     o To the build infrastructure for libreadline, for greater portability 
and easier configuration;
     o Additional quoting code to sendsize, sendbackup, and driver to index 
filenames with spaces and colons;
     o Allowing 'make dist' to run without a preceeding 'make all';
     o Including more build information in 'amadmin version'; and
     o Greater portability of arguments to the ssh command, as suggested by a 
community user. 

In the background, Jean-Louis Martineau continues work on the Application API, 
and Ian Turner is putting the finishing touches on the Device API. Look for 
large patches with these changes in the coming months. 

Sincerely,

--Ian Turner

-- 
Zmanda: Open Source Backup and Recovery.
        http://www.zmanda.com