On Tuesday 01 July 2014 10:13:56 John Hein did opine And Gene did reply: > Jon LaBadie wrote at 09:43 -0400 on Jul 1, 2014: > > On Tue, Jul 01, 2014 at 09:19:19AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > > > Greetings all; > > > > > > Pursuant to a conversation on the dovecot list about the > > > relatively long times involved in rebuilding the dovecot.index > > > file when it gets out of sync. > > > > > > It strikes me that if the backup program could be co-erced into > > > sending a signal when it starts to backup a named directory, a > > > signal that holds it until the processing of incoming mail has > > > been stopped and the ack signal that it has been stopped sent > > > back to amanda, effectively freezing the contents of what would > > > normally be an active directory, so that the email corpus AND all > > > its indexes would then be in sync when the backup is done. > > > > > > This would make any recovery efforts later into a considerable > > > smoother action. > > > > > > I can see where such a feature could also be useful for a database > > > of most any sort, mail being only an example. > > > > > > How feasible would it be to add this capability to amanda? > > > > I suspect a difficult problem would be how to get the multiple > > programs that modify the named directory to honor flag. > > There already is support for performing operations before and after > the dump (among other things): > > http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Script_API > > For older amanda versions that don't have the script API, the classic > method (which you can still use with newer amanda) is to configure > your amanda client to use a wrapper script instead of gtar or dump. > Then your wrapper script can determine if the DLE is one for which you > want to run some command to suspend normal operations (e.g., quiesce a > database or mail server) during the backup.
Thanks John, I wasn't aware that it had become possible. Running an older 4.something alpha here. Probably close to 2 years old. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS
