On 03/17 11:58 , Philip Parsons (Velindre - Medical Physics) wrote:
> I had an installation of backuppc v3.3 (I think) and installed via apt-get on 
> debian.

<snip>

> I saw on the backuppc site that v4.0 was available, but it didn't appear in 
> the package lists.  So I downloaded the tarball and upgraded from that. Using 
> configure.pl.

It's pretty universally a bad idea to mix installations of software by
packages and tarballs. If you install something one way, stick with that. As
someone who has to maintain a non-trivial number of systems, I would
*really* encourage you to always use packages instead of tarballs - even if
you have to wait for a while for someone to make a package (or make a
package yourself - it's actually not that hard).

The problem is that packages and tarballs (as you've noticed) don't always
(perhaps not even 'often') install to the same locations. So init scripts
and other tools often have problems finding the correct locations for any
given file.

Also, when it comes time to remove or upgrade the software, tarballs don't
give you an option to do that easily. Nor do they allow you to revert out
the software installation easily. If you try to remove a package after
having clobbered some of the files in it with a tarball, you're likely to
get package manager errors (files not found, etc) and possibly be stuck with
them until you do some serious tinkering with your package database.


I would really recommend that you try out BackupPC 4.0 on a fresh OS
install. Put it on a test box, put it on a virtual machine (ideally a VM
which would allow you to roll back to a previous snapshot if things go badly
wrong). Try it out and see if it does what you want. Then, ideally, set up a
new production box in parallel with the old one and start backing up hosts
to the new machine in parallel with the old one. Then shut down the old one.


Now that you have your situation tho.. it's not hopeless, but you will learn
a lot before you have it all working again. Look at it as a learning
experience. :)

-- 
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com

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