Thank you very much for reporting this issue relating to md5 on Linux (ubuntu).
With your permission, I will add you to the list of contributors on the LBackup website. Please let me know if you have a personal or company URL you would like to have linked with your name. > 1. md5 > ------ > When running lbackup, at some point the command md5 is invoked: > > /usr/local/libexec/lbackup/message_templates/mail_logerror_attachment.sh > (line 47) > and in the same directory > mail_standard_attachment.sh (line 45) > > On ubuntu, md5 seems not to be part of the standard distribution, at least > not by that name. On ubuntu the respective command is md5sum. This issue and the fixed and will be part of the next release. Again thank you for reporting this issue. > 2. sendmail > ----------- > sendmail is not configured on my system: > sendmail: fatal: open /etc/postfix/main.cf: No such file or directory > It seems a big requirement needing to configure sendmail just for sending > mail from a shell script. > > There's a dead simple to use alternative: sendemail > (http://caspian.dotconf.net/menu/Software/SendEmail/). > It's perl-based but requires no other modules, hence runs off the > cuff. It supports everything required by lbackup including attaching files, > yet in a simpler way (e.g. no need to base64-encode attachments "manually"). > > Replacing sendmail with sendemail would also rid us of the missing md5 > problem (1. above). If anyone's interested I could provide patches. LBackup has a feature to use custom per backup configuration mail templates. Within your mail configuration file enable the custom mail template. See below for an example of the section of the mail configuration file. # Search for custom mail templates directory "message_templates" and files. # This feature is experimental and may be altered or removed in a future # release. Finally, enabling this feature has the potential to # significantly reduce the reliability of email reporting. enableCustomMailTemplates="YES" Next create a 'message_templates' directory within your LBackup configuration directory and as a starting point copy the /usr/local/libexec/lbackup/message_templates/ into this directory. From here you may replace send mail with sendemail and even if you update LBackup you will keep using your mail template which may be configured to use sendemail. The idea behind the ability to enable custom mail templates is that you can use which every system you like for email delivery. Another option if you have access SSH access to a system with send mail compatible server installed and configured is to enable SSH email delivery via a remote system. This configuration is also made within the mail configuration file. Below are the relevant settings from the example_mail.conf file. # Specify the mail system : available options : "SSH", "LOCAL" mailsystem="SSH" # SSH Settings - only required if you have selected SSH mail system sshUser="mail" sshServer="192.168.0.1" Certainly, a possibility for the future is to add another option within lmail which will allow you to call sendemail for the mailsystem. This would mean that there could be something like the following within the example_mail.conf : # Specify the mail system : available options : "SSH", "LOCAL", "sendemail" This is not implemented. However it is a possibility. No one has yet mentioned an issue with using a local mail system / SSH mail system. However, I understand that having this other option built-in could be useful for some situations. > 3. symlinks and samba > --------------------- > My destination for the backup happens to be a mounted samba drive which lacks > support of symbolic links. These occur in some situations of my source to be > backed up. > Is there a standard way to deal with this situation? > (I think none of rsync's options satisfactorily handle this particular case: > I would like to reproduce the exact same state from my backup. --links: With > the target filesystem's lack of support for symbolic links, simple copying is > not available. > --copy-links: Collapsing of links is not the same as keeping them verbatim) Another issue with backing up to a samba drive may be that via you issues with generating hard-links in order reduce the disk usage. I am under the impression that hard-links are not supported with a remote file system mounted via samba. However, I could be mistaken. I suggest one possibility is running LBackup in pull mode on the system which has the volume locally available. The file system of the backup drive will need to support hard links in order to preserve space. This may be a good question for the rsync mailing list. LBackup currently has no support for backing up to remote file systems unless you pull them to the file system or if you push or pull a image which is locally mounted for the backup. The following links may be helpful : - http://www.lbackup.org/synchronizing_disk_images_between_machines - http://www.lbackup.org/network_backup_strategies > > 4. rsync options > ---------------- > Is there a standard way to plug in options into the rsync command invoked by > lbackup? Not at present. The only way currently is to edit the backup script. If there is an option you would like to be able to enable then please let me know. It could be added as an option within the lbackup configuration. This has been mentioned. Possibly a redesigning how LBackup works could make this a possibility in the future. At present the idea is to keep the options for rsync to a minimum within LBackup. However, I fully understand that this is a feature which could be useful. I think that a redesign of the way LBackup could allow this to happen. It would be best to making certain aspects of LBackup more modular. For example one module could call rsync, this would be LBackup backend (which performs hard linking). Then there could be a control module which provides a simplification for the options (this module would be a of wrapper around the backend). With a re-design like this it would be possible to pass arguments directly to the LBackup backend (hard linking components) from the configuration system. You could even bypass the control module for full control from the configuration file. For people who are after simple configuration or for a set of backup options you could then call the higher level module. There are no immediate plans to do this. However, it is certainly the way to go. It is going to require some refactoring and changes to the design of LBackup. This is certainly, the way I would like to see LBackup develop. > Maybe lbackup could do a prerequisite check whether all required tools are > present? And possibly dispatch to different commands depending on the OS? > E.g. > > if uname -a | grep -i ubuntu >/dev/null 2>&1; then > MD5=md5sum > else > MD5=md5 > fi Yes this is a good suggestion. Thank you for the suggestion. I have added a similar implementation which supports older version of ubuntu and other LINUX versions as well. As mentioned this will be fixed within the next release. Thank you very much again for your assistance. Keep in touch. _______________________________________________ lbackup-discussion mailing list http://www.lbackup.org Change options or unsubscribe : http://lbackup.org/mailing_lists
