On Sat, 13 Oct 2007, dan wrote:
> one thing that i know about software systems is the the most vanilla setup
> is the best setup.
The setup that works the way I need it to and does what I want is the best
setup *for me*. That might be a vanilla setup, or it might be one I've
modded the hell out of. If I mod it, I document it so I can do it again
later if I need to.
> i did post your info on the wiki as im sure it will be useful for many
> people but would also like to influence devolopement to remove the need for
> many of these workarounds.
What you call workarounds, I call combining 2 (or more, depending on how
you count them) opensource software projects to enhance each others'
functionality.
> i think we need a much more general approach to this issue. as long as the
> laptops can be seen with nmblookup then a minor modification to the core
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
And if they can't? Because the laptop is halfway around the world for 6
months? Or is at an employee's home and is never brought in? Or is at work
but is never plugged into a wired port (and wireless is a different VLAN)?
You can tell a user "you must bring your laptop into work every X days,
connect it to the local LAN, and leave it connected for at least Y hours"
(where Y is your average backup duration plus some amount of time
sufficient to process the difference between the average number of
simultaneous 'new' laptops on the LAN and your MaxBackups), but few of them
will actually do it.
> program to wakeup much more frequently and skip the standard blackout
> period. when a host comes online, it broadcasts on the local network that
> arrival and i think we could get backuppc to monitor that broadcast and do
> an immediate backup of that machine based on the standard criteria. some
> 'smarts' should be included to keep from having extra backups done because
> of network disconnects and such.
>
> the solution could be a helper daemon that watches for the broadcasts and
> also does some broadcasts itself, reads the config file for that host and
> the main config file and sends the backup command to backuppc. could be
> done in a bash script but perl might be a bit better. any ideas on this??
Sounds like almost as much work as I did. ;-) Seriously, if you want me to
describe what I did in those same simple terms, it's "Why not use some
other backup application, like Unison, that can be user-initiated and
which, because it can work over an SSH tunnel, can operate from virtually
anywhere in the world, to actually back up the laptops of 'road warriors'
to a local server? BackupPC could then be configured to backup each
laptop's Unison directory from that server. Some 'smarts' should be
included to make sure they don't step on each others' toes."
My instructions just tell you how to do that and the scripts try to make
sure that the two applications aren't operating on the same directory at
the same time with some status flags. I also assume that the same server
will be used for both Unison cache and BackupPC, but you don't need to if
you have a fast interconnect between the 2...
I happen to really like Unison. If you've never used it, it has a decent
gui and gives the user a percent-done for each changed file or directory
while it works. Positive feedback to end-users is almost always a good
thing.
In closing, if you have a better solution for backing up laptops that are
outside the local LAN, let's hear it. If you have suggestions for
clarifying my instructions, email them to me; if they're clearer than mine
I'll probably use them. If you think what I describe is too complicated for
you, don't do it. No one will twist your arm and force you to implement it.
(OK, *I* won't, I don't know who you work for. :-)
Cheers, Stephen
--
Stephen Joyce
Systems Administrator P A N I C
Physics & Astronomy Department Physics & Astronomy
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Network Infrastructure
voice: (919) 962-7214 and Computing
fax: (919) 962-0480 http://www.panic.unc.edu
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.
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