On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Alan Pearson<alandpearson AT yahoo DOT com> 
wrote:
> You have to appreciate a lot of people have AMANDA in production
> environments and it is working. We are very reluctant to change it in case
> it breaks, we don't want the overhead of having to fix it.

Absolutely -- I hope I did not imply that everyone, or even most
people, should be running snapshots!  But hopefully at least a few
people can spare some resources to test things out and alert us to any
problems.

> I am especially nervous to change since AMANDA has changed so much (read -
> the change to PERL) and is no longer a straight upgrade with bugfixes and
> new features

We're working double-time to ensure backward compatibility, and any
failing on that point is a bug.  But certainly backups are often a
set-it-and-forget-it kind of technology, and frequent upgrades can be
disruptive, even if they are smooth.

> I personally think this is a failing of the AMANDA team to realise this,
> and to see that a lot of sys admins are reluctant to upgrade for these
> reasons.

I realize that Amanda is working great *right now* for a number of
people, but if the project is to remain relevant, it must serve the
needs of today's new installations, while remaining fully compatibile
with existing installations.

That's a lot to ask, and it's not easy.  I think we deserve some
credit for our success so far, and some support for our continued
committment to backward compatibility.  Which brings me back to the
original topic: any and all assistance with testing recent versions of
Amanda in different situations is extraordinarily helpful to ensuring
backward compatibility.

For example, Alan, it would be great to hear from you that the
Kerberos authentication continues to function in the latest snapshots,
particularly since it is not something to which we can apply unit
tests (we have almost 2000 unit tests at this point, by the way).
That only has to mean setting up Amanda on a throwaway machine or VM,
running amservice to verify the authentication, and dropping a note to
amanda-users AT amanda DOT org with the results.

The snapshots are here:
  http://www.zmanda.com/community-builds.php
and to be clear: please do *not* run snapshots in production!

Dustin

-- 
Open Source Storage Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com