is there a way to influence the planner not only such that it balances out the space across all days, but also that it tries spreading out level 0s across all hosts per day, so that I not end up having one host dump all fs's at L0 one day, then the next host on the next day?
Not directly, but I've noticed that if you "amadmin force" some DLE, amanda has a strong tendency to follow you, even in the next cycles.
While I can see scenarios in which it is desirable to have as many level0s per host on the same day as possible, in my case I do backups over a slow (ADSL via IPSEC VPN link), which take a long time. So I would like to have it do at most 2 level0 dumps (out of abt 5 filesystems each) per day per host?
I can see the problem. Maybe by using a well thought out script using "amadmin due" and "admin force", you can influence the planner each day. With 5 filesystems per host, you need a runspercycle of at least 5. You force a full dump each day, letting amanda room for promoting one other full dump too. Also take into account that the planner in amanda tries to backup the same amount of full dumps each run. See "amadmin balance" to find out how much. If on one run, there is still room for some more full backups, amanda will promote some DLE's from next days.
To avoid that amanda reschedules too much, you'll have to "admin force" a good set of disks, so that each run satisfies as much as possible this requirement. Amanda will only delay full backups if the tape is full. If you can define a runspercycle of e.g. 10, and you "amadmin force" each disk in less days, then amanda will not fall into the habit of promoting disks.
Ok, now you've got to do the planning, and amanda's planner will only fill in the details.
the dumporder parameter is only checked by the driver, after the planner made its decisions, right?
Finally, I would like to repear my question whether it's possible to run the planner standalone to find out what it would do on the next run without actually performing the backup..
amdump is just a shell script. See about line 99. Maybe you can run, as user amanda, the line:
$libexecdir/planner Config
I've never tried it myself...
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