Replying inline

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Bacula-devel] bconsole restore parsing/handling
From: Kern Sibbald <k...@sibbald.com>
Date: Thu, January 10, 2013 6:28 am
To: etanneh...@godaddy.com
Cc: bacula-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, Frank Barker
<frank.bar...@baculasystems.com>, Aristide Caraccio
<aristide.carac...@baculasystems.com>

Hello,

I will try to answer your questions below, but first, I would strongly
suggest that if you are not already in touch with Cartika, you should be.
We (Bacula Systems) have worked with them over the past 9 months to
implement a Cartika ISP/MSP service based on Bacula Enterprise
that probably covers everything you want to
do.  If you want to do it yourself, that is OK, but from what we already
know, it will likely be a much bigger task than you imagine.

**  it is a VERY large task.  At the same time our goal is to give back to the open source community and improve the open source project while we build an enterprise backup system around Bacula.  We have a developer dedicated just to this project as well as an engineer.  We also have very large groups of full-time DBA's, linux engineers and developers of about any programming language you can think of to tap.  Our resources aren't unlimited, but we are positioned extremely well to succeed.

I am copying our CEO (Frank Barker) and our World Wide director of sales
(Aristide Cariccio), so if you need some help getting in touch with the
right people in Cartika, they can help you.


**  I'd be happy to speak with them, however the internal project is already moving along well with custom built interfaces for ops teams.  It may be a tough sell, but it never hurts to try :)

Concerning bconsole and parsing file lists:
- Other than a few internal @ commands, bconsole is nothing
  but a network pass through to the Bacula Director.  That is
  bconsole has little or no intelligence.  It is sort of like miniterm
  or any TTY terminal program.

**This tells me I need to broaden my understanding of what the director is and how it works, but it gives me a good starting point.

- Bacula has a number of ways of doing restores.  If you want
  to program something, you probably should look at the BVFS
  (Bacula Virtual File System) commands that can be used through
  bconsole to interface to the catalog.  The BVFS commands are
  documented in the manual.


** Initial glances look good, again I need to dig deeper

- Concerning parsing file lists: There are many
  ways of getting file lists from Bacula including directly from the catalog
  and "parsing" them depends on what programming language you are
  using C, C++, Python, Perl, PHP, ...


** My background has been in expensive enterprise backup software in the past, coming into a project working to leverage Bacula it never occurred to me to simply run my own DB queries *BONK!*.  Welcome to being unchained thanks to open source!  Time to dissect the DB now :)

- To a minimal extent, bconsole can be scripted. This is documented in the
   manual, and there are many examples of scripting bconsole in
   <bacula>/regress/tests/, which you can clone through our
   git repository -- see the web site (www.bacula.org).


** Our developer has tried these and come up with mixed results, hence the attempt to look for ways around the problem rather than through it.

Your specific questions:
- Does it pass it to another program?  Yes, it passes everything (well almost)
  directly to the Director.
- Use any intermediary files? No, not unless you use one of the @ commands
  (@output, @tee) to redirect the tty output to a file.
- How does it store info on which files are marked for restore? All state information
  is inside Bacula core code either in the BVFS C++ code, or in the interactive
  restore built into Bacula which uses red/black trees and is also written in C++.

Bottom line: I strongly recommend that you talk to Cartika as they have already
done everything that I expect you want, and they have a very close working
relationship with Bacula Systems.


** By all means, if we can accomplish our goals while reducing the cost of internal development it absolutely should be reviewed as an option.  I'll e-mail you separately from the list to provide contact info.

Best regards,
Kern


On 01/07/2013 11:03 PM, etanneh...@godaddy.com wrote:
I am working with a team creating automation via a web interface for Bacula.  A major hangup is the restore ability.  The only way to get good file restores is from bconsole as other methods may not follow "accurate" or proper incremental restore locations and file permissions.

We are looking into creating a wrapper or method of simply parsing a file list instead but need a greater understanding of how bconsole handles restores.

Does it pass it to another program?  Use any intermediary files?  How does it store info on which files are marked for restore?

Help in understanding the backbone of this process would be greatly appreciated.


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