Re: [Bacula-users] Setup advices for some heterogenous set of server

Hi Arno,

Thanks for your answers, and sorry for the delay to answer back.

To answer your questions :

I've control (directly or indirectly) of the firewall, but I'd rather use a ssh tunnels. My homeServer has access to other servers with certificate authentication.
I can set explicit rule to the firewall to allow acces to the needed port, but ssh is better on security concern.

Btw, when compression is done ? by the client or by the storage? because, in this last case, ssh built in compression could be a nice help.

Each blue 'backbone' on the schema represents a /24 network and all servers are in this subnet. All server has public IP address and an FQDN.

Over the servers, the amount of data should not be that uge (only website, configuration script, no logfile or mail inbox).
In case of machine crash, each machine setup is documented, so that to resume the service, I've to reinstall the system (less than an hour for the secondary DNS server) and restore data.
Each machine have or will have a mirror server on another physical site.

   It's probably not the best solution, but given my mean, I can only afford that solution.

I also wanted to set this kind of backup :

1 mounthly full backup of the file system.
1 daily incremental backup of the filesystem.
1 daily full backup of databases.

because, in my case, the filesystem isn't modifyed heavily, most of the udpates are done in the databases. I think it's suitable for my specific case, but there are maybe some convients I didn't see....

About the setup itself : The more I read, the more I get confused... the doc is not easy to get a simple and working configuration.
I've read more than 150 pages, and still have no concrete material to configure a simple setup...

I'm quite found of learning by example, which you usually find for every software, but here... not that much indeed...

the only tuto I've found :

http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/bacula1.htm

doesn't explain really much things.

What I'd like, is to

1/ enable a working backup on the homeServer (director hosting)

test it, play with it with some simple test case like :

   make a backup of a directory,
   delete (or move outside the dir) one file in the directory,
   restore the file.

   make a backup of a directory
   modify a file
   make a incremental backup
   modify the same file

   make a incremental backup
   modify the same file

walk though the different 'version' of this file.

It would be nice, if bacula team could setup a vmware using a linux distro like ubuntu with several test case pre-setup to speed up the learning curve.

2/ Once I've setup the backup for the server, add a remote client (through ssh) (and next add all others)

I find it better to have on directory per client (can't explain why, but sounds safer),

I've read the basic volume managment chapter which tell I should add a device per client with a Type per Device so that everything isn't mixed up.

Well I'll explore this later..

I'll try now to get something working on the homeServer itself.

tomorrow, I'll probably setup a ubuntu on vmware to practice some test case and may publish it on my blog (well the size of the vmware could be an issue ;o)

Thomas.

On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 11:30, Arno Lehmann <al AT its-lehmann DOT de> wrote:

Hello,

03.02.2009 13:44, Thomas Manson wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've read quite some stuff about bacula, but I'm still not sure of the
> best way to implement it.
>
> I've attached a simple diagram that represent the network as it will
> soon be. (DNS Server 1 and WebServer 2 are not yet setup).
>
> On each server of the left side, the host provider gives 160GB of disk
> on FTP.
> The Home Server is the server that will run the Backup Director.
>
> Over internet, servers can communicate via SSH. Additionnal port can
> be opened, but I'd rather not.

You can tunnel any connection where you can specify the host and port
to use through ssh. In Bacula, you could set up the tunnels using a
run before job script.

A regular VPN might be easier to maintain, though harder to set up.

> HomeServer and Office Server has an 1MByte/s download and 100KByte/s
> upload capabilities.

That's a bit limited for backup purposes of large data sets.

> Other Servers have more the 50MByte/s upload capabilities
>
> For WebServer1 & 3, and Office Server, I've no other solution that get
> backup to HomeServer.
> For other servers, I've the 160GB disks available, but I'm not sure of
> their reliabality (Probably not raid 1 or 5 device, who can access).
>
> Any thought, advice?

Well, it's quite important to know where you want your backups to end
up. Assuming you want them all consolidated on the HomeServer, you'd
need some VPN/ssh tunnels to all the servers you want to back up.

Once those exist, it's a rather standard situation to set up Bacula
accordingly.

If you need to keep backup data on te different sites because of the
traffic limitations, you'll end up with a number of SDs - one in each
location - but you can still control those with a single DIR instance.
Getting a usable setup might be difficult because the SD address in
the configuration needs to be valid both for the DIR and the FDs
accessing that SD - again, a VPN might be useful, but some careful
/etc/hosts edits on all the sites might do the trick.

If all your servers are accessible with public IPs / DNS names, that's
not much of an issue, though.

More specific advice would require some more knowledge about your
network layout - are those heavily firewalled networks, do they share
a common DNS zone, or are they even networks completely separated from
each other?

Arno

>
> Regards,
> Thomas.
>
>
>
>
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resources and data with the reach of the web. Download the Adobe AIR SDK and
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