On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 02:57:09PM -0500, John R. Jackson wrote:
[...]
> >> I have a Network Appliance box ...
>
> This comes up here every once in a while. I did a very quick search
> and didn't find the person I'm thinking of, but someone came up with
> a mechanism for doing these backups (short of the yet to be completed
> DUMPER-API, which is the real solution). Maybe they will respond,
> or you could search the mailing list archive a little harder than I did.
I'm backing up a NetApp Filer with Amanda with a little help from some
Perl scripts... I don't remember exactly now, but I once posted two
URLs about the way it goes. Basically, you create some special
devices (just dummies to fool Amanda) like /dev/netapp/filer01/blah
and replace /sbin/dump by a wrapper script looking for these special
devices. If found, it runs dump on the filer via rsh and fools Amanda
again giving her the dump's output as if it was a local disk; else it
starts the real dump program. I also hacked Amanda's code to be able
to parse the output of NetApp's dump.
But I went into problems with these scripts: I got nasty Amanda mails
saying "no estimate", blah... when dumping three filesystems from the
same filer. Trying to track it down left me down in some nasty signal
handling in Perl. This is necessary because Amanda runs dump on each
disk to be backed up via dump and parses the output for something like
"DUMP: estimated 47893 KB" to get planner's input. Then SIGTERM is
sent to this dump process.
My impression was: these scripts (used by xs4all.nl) are written for
several filers with one filesystem on each to be backed up but not for
several filesystems on a single filer.
There are some problems left I can't resolve yet, and I ended up in
backing up an all-in-one-single-filesystem whose full dump fills 95 %
of a DLT IV tape. As business grows, soon I'll have to find a solution
for this issue...
