Good points and I do appreciate the effort that is put into AMANDA and its
backwards compatibility.
I guess testing the client is easy, and something I will try to do over
the next few weeks and report the results, but changing the server side..
well that scares me :)

:)

-- 
AlanP

On Tue, August 11, 2009 4:48 pm, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> 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
>