Good points and I do appreciate the effort that is put into AMANDA and its backwards compatibility. I guess testing the client is easy, and something I will try to do over the next few weeks and report the results, but changing the server side.. well that scares me :)
:) -- AlanP On Tue, August 11, 2009 4:48 pm, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote: > On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Alan Pearson<alandpear...@yahoo.com> > wrote: >> You have to appreciate a lot of people have AMANDA in production >> environments and it is working. We are very reluctant to change it in >> case >> it breaks, we don't want the overhead of having to fix it. > > Absolutely -- I hope I did not imply that everyone, or even most > people, should be running snapshots! But hopefully at least a few > people can spare some resources to test things out and alert us to any > problems. > >> I am especially nervous to change since AMANDA has changed so much (read >> - >> the change to PERL) and is no longer a straight upgrade with bugfixes >> and >> new features > > We're working double-time to ensure backward compatibility, and any > failing on that point is a bug. But certainly backups are often a > set-it-and-forget-it kind of technology, and frequent upgrades can be > disruptive, even if they are smooth. > >> I personally think this is a failing of the AMANDA team to realise this, >> and to see that a lot of sys admins are reluctant to upgrade for these >> reasons. > > I realize that Amanda is working great *right now* for a number of > people, but if the project is to remain relevant, it must serve the > needs of today's new installations, while remaining fully compatibile > with existing installations. > > That's a lot to ask, and it's not easy. I think we deserve some > credit for our success so far, and some support for our continued > committment to backward compatibility. Which brings me back to the > original topic: any and all assistance with testing recent versions of > Amanda in different situations is extraordinarily helpful to ensuring > backward compatibility. > > For example, Alan, it would be great to hear from you that the > Kerberos authentication continues to function in the latest snapshots, > particularly since it is not something to which we can apply unit > tests (we have almost 2000 unit tests at this point, by the way). > That only has to mean setting up Amanda on a throwaway machine or VM, > running amservice to verify the authentication, and dropping a note to > amanda-users@amanda.org with the results. > > The snapshots are here: > http://www.zmanda.com/community-builds.php > and to be clear: please do *not* run snapshots in production! > > Dustin > > -- > Open Source Storage Engineer > http://www.zmanda.com >