I'm struggling with similar issues.
What I did was try to find a solution based on
setting starttime in the dumptype. My first attempt
was to use starttime to delay the start of the laptop
until mid-day (amanda runs about 3am). This achieved
nothing, because amanda couldn't reach the laptop at 3am,
and therefore it was left out of the plan entirely.
My second attempt was to start amdump at 12:30 (pm),
with "starttime 300" for the dumptype used by all the
other machines. This failed because amanda decided that
300 really mean _this_ am, thus the time was already past,
so everything happened during the daytime.
Finally, I hacked the source. In conffile.c, there is code
(about line 1934 in 2.4.2p1) like this:
stm = localtime(&st);
st -= stm->tm_sec + 60 * (stm->tm_min + 60 * stm->tm_hour);
st += ((hhmm/100*60) + hhmm%100)*60;
if (st-start_time.r.tv_sec<-43200)
st += 86400;
I simply changed 43200 to 0.
This isn't ideal, because amanda is "running" most of the time now.
If a machine crashes or is rebooted for some reason, it probably will
be left out of the nightly backups. And it really smells like a hack.
What I'd prefer is something like the following:
- the ability to run amdump for a subset of the clients somehow
- a way to make amdump leave stuff on the holding disk if it's less
that a full tape's worth
- amdump would recognize any dumps on the holding disk when it starts,
and incorporate them into it's schedule for writing out to tape.
Any other ideas, especially ones that aren't hacks and don't require
re-designing amanda?
Jan Edler
