On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 12:54:38PM -0500, Tom Duerbusch wrote: > Using Amanda in a traditional network world, Amanda would be running on > a server with tape drives and the clients will be running on other > images and the backups are taken over the network. Sure, saves on tape > drives. > But on a mainframe, each image can own the tape drives. > I'm wondering (pros and cons) if anyone has made every Linux image, an > Amanda server and just back up its self. No network envolved. It seems > like it would be more efficient, but then....I think there would be a > lot of unknowns of how things work when you actually need something > restored (or your image rebuilt).
You could do it this way, but part of the convenience of tools like Amanda is that that Amanda database keeps track of what file is on what tape -- and if everybody's doing their own backups to a database in the same server, it's a real PITA if that server gets destroyed and the Amanda database goes with it. That's kind of the point of the client/server model; the client servers don't need to retain all that state information, the server is the only place you need to worry about it. Recovery is a lot easier in that scenario: you just need to restore the Amanda server, and then restore everything else from that image. If you separate the backup server from the clients you can also shut it down and get a absolutely clean image backup of it with DDR or similar tools w/o interrupting production work. Third, you'd have to do all the TMS and tape management integration for every server. Getting tape drives on and offline to Linux is still a PITA, even if you use the tape mount widget we wrote. Do you really want to have to do all that work for every guest when you can create private LAN segments with one command? > Or maybe Amanda just won't run this way. It will. It's just a lot more work to do it that way for no real benefit. -- db ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
