On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 03:13:33PM -0800, Jeffrey D Anderson wrote:
> stan wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 12:12:36PM -0800, Jeffrey D Anderson wrote:
> >> stan wrote:
> >> 
> >> > I started a discussion about this the other day, and I am trying to
> >> > work through this as a background task while doing the rest of the
> >> > things i have to do. I thought I would point out what a PIA it is
> >> > turning into to get newer version of Amanda compiled on older machines.
> >> > 
> >> > The glib dependency requires gettext. Also glib will not compile with
> >> > older versions of GCC. Now GCC used to build pretty well on older
> >> > machines, but it looks like the 4.x version of it now depends upon a
> >> > couple of math packages gmp, an mpfr. So, to migrate a given client
> >> > (HP-UX in this case) Howard, I am having to compile the following list
> >> > of things that did not used to be dependencies:
> >> > 
> >> > gettext
> >> > gmp
> >> > mpfr
> >> > gcc
> >> > glub
> >> > 
> >> > That's a lot of stuff just to replace working code with "more
> >> > maintainable" code IMHO.
> >> > 
> >> > I really think we need to come up with a plan that results in it being
> >> > easier to comile clients on older machines. I have expressed my opinion
> >> > that this needs to be a forkof a 2.5 branch, but I did not seem to get
> >> > much in the way of buy in by others on this list ofr that. Does anyiine
> >> > have a better plan?
> >> > 
> >> > 
> >> 
> >> I have numerous clients still running amanda 2.4.x clients and talking to
> >> my
> >> 2.6.1 server.  I would think that maintaining backward compatibility
> >> within the amanda server is a more fruitful path than trying to build the
> >> latest
> >> version on all sorts of older platforms.  Is there reason to believe that
> >> older clients will become unsupported sometime soon?
> >> 
> > Have you tried restoring? I have a contractor whose assignment is to prove
> > that we can estore on evey machine in the backup system. She assures me
> > that earlier cliets cannot do this, and that we must move foward. I have 2
> > reasons to beleive her. 1. I trust her, and have worked with her for
> > years. 2. It's a fixed price job for here, and the answer she came up will
> > definatley cost her money.
> > 
> > 
> 
> I always restore on the server, then transfer files to the clients.  That
> clearly works.  I can see that if you need to be able to run amrecover
> directly on the clients there are more potential problems with old
> versions.  Note, though, that even if the amanda configuration is totally
> broken, it is always POSSIBLE to restore just using dd and tar or dump. 
> Maybe not convenient, though.  You never want to get to that stage if you
> can avoid it.
Thanks. I am actually _very_ awate of this, and have bailed myself out of
all sorts of major  diasasters using this. However, in my case, I need to
be able to provide "user friendly" resore _on the client. It' is part of
the requirments documnet for the system. I need to ahve a procedure usable
by a resoanbly non technical user to acomplish this. amrecover is how I
satisy thsi requirement.

-- 
One of the main causes of the fall of the roman empire was that, lacking
zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
programs.