>>From this should I conclude that Legato doesn't support AFS? I wrote
>to your company last week to ask about this but so far have received
>no response.
To follow up my own posting, in response to the above, Mr. Mee
forwarded an article describing one known way to backup AFS volumes
through Networker using something called Box Hill's Vosasm. I've
included the article below. Has anyone here tried this or found
any other method you consider useful for backing up AFS servers
with a commercial software package?
-Mitch
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BOX HILL'S VOSASM
PROVIDES AFS VOLUME-LEVEL SUPPORT FOR NETWORKER BACKUPS
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The AFS distributed file system stores files in AFS-formatted partitions
called vice partitions, rather than on standard UNIX UFS partitions. Within
partitions, files are stored in AFS units called volumes. As a result,
attempts by NetWorker to back up AFS files during a standard NetWorker
backup
are unsuccessful.
Implementation
--------------
AFS provides a utility (vos dump) that can be used to dump AFS volume data
to
a plain file or another program. Legato provides a utility (nsrfile) that
can
accept input from another program and store it as a single file on tape and
in
NetWorker's on-line index.
To these utilities Box Hill adds a third: vosasm, a program built on top of
nsrfile and vos dump to provide the necessary "glue" logic and
synchronization
between NetWorker and AFS to ensure that each AFS volume is backed up
automatically.
Backup
------
By itself, NetWorker attempts to back up Vice partitions as if they were
ordinary UNIX file systems. Box Hill adds a special NetWorker directive to
specify that vosasm be used to back up files within Vice partitions. vosasm
enumerates the list of AFS volumes within the Vice partition, and for each
read/write volume, it creates a read-only backup volume and then uses vos
dump
and nsrfile to save the backup partition with NetWorker. Ad-hoc backups may
also be done by invoking the NetWorker save utility to save an AFS volume
within a Vice partition, which will obey the special directive and invoke
vosasm as described above.
Recovery
--------
In order to perform a recovery operation, the system administrator first
determines the name of the AFS volume containing the file(s) to be
recovered.
The system administrator then logs on to the AFS server that performed the
volume dump (or another AFS server authorized to recover the original
server's
backups) and uses the NetWorker recover utility to select the desired
version
of the AFS volume. AFS volume names appear in NetWorker's on-line file
index
with symbolic names indicating the vice partition from which they were
backed
up. The volume data is restored to a new volume that is accessible to the
system administrator and the end user.
Security
--------
In a standard AFS backup, the backup process must be authenticated on each
server machine participating in the backup. vosasm runs entirely on the
local
AFS server, using AFS "local authentication". Therefore, no special
authentication or passwords are required, because vosasm backs up only
those
volumes which are physically resident on its current AFS server.
NetWorker provides additional host-based and user ID-based access controls
to
protect saved volumes from unauthorized hosts or users.
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--
"Families can't trust Disney"
