Les Mikesell wrote at about 17:33:35 -0500 on Thursday, August 20, 2009:
 > John Rouillard wrote:
 > > On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 03:14:49PM -0500, Jim Leonard wrote:
 > >> John Rouillard wrote:
 > >>> Well not quite. It's getting better with $Conf{RsyncArgsExtra} for
 > >>> example.  I don't have to copy the whole $Conf{RsyncArgs} stanza into
 > >>> my pc/hostname.pl file.
 > >> I haven't ever touched/created a hostname.pl file -- I've done 
 > >> everything in the GUI with "override" checked for a particular host's 
 > >> configuration.  It creates very neat and tidy hostname.pl files for me, 
 > > 
 > > That doesn't scale well when you are running a couple of hundred hosts
 > > across three different backup servers and you have standard backup
 > > recipies for particular services on those hosts.
 > 
 > Unless you get 'owners' to go with the hosts...
 > 
 > > When you change the services so that new backups have to be added
 > > (i.e. change recipies), or you move services and the configs have to
 > > change it's a lot easier to have a single set of hostname.pl files to
 > > distribute to all the backup servers. Doing it this way means not
 > > going "oops you mean we didn't have an off site backup of that
 > > filesystem?" and makes auditing on a regular basis (say weekly)
 > > possible.
 > 
 > I think it would be a little nicer if there were another layer of 
 > inheritance - like a group config file that could be evaluated between 
 > the master and per-host configs so you could control settings that are 
 > common for several machines in one place.  But auditing should probably 
 > be done against the archive filesystem instead of the configs.

I think several people have had similar suggestions about the
desirability of creating backup "groups" where policies would apply to
a group of hostnames. I currently try to kludge this by using either
links to a common host config file and/or perl code with a hack that
uses tests against the hostname.

Ideally it would be nice to have the following:
- Ability to define (potentially overlapping) groups of backup
  hostnames
- Ability to optionally set variables by hostname or hostname group.
  E.g., like:
  $Conf{VariableName} = {
         'hostA' => aaaaaa,
         'hostB' => bbbbbb,
         'groupC' => ccccc,
         'groupD' => ddddd,
                 '*' => eeeee,
                 }

- Easy access to the hostname of the current backup by setting $host
  or some variable like that. (I know you can get the hostname using
  the kludge that I noted previously but that is undocumented and
  could potentially break if the method of sourcing the config files
  changes.

- Continued ability to override (with inheritance) config.pl with
  individual hostname files. 

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