Re: AMDUMP--newbie question
On Monday 04 February 2002 12:25, Alvaro Rosales R. wrote: Hi fellows, finnally I've got amanda running I have made some tests and I could see that amanda is what I was looking for, Now I want to make amanda use a tape per day but I want it to make full backups of my data each day I run it , How can I do this ?? Thanks in advance fo ryour answers in your amanda.conf file use these settings dumpcycle 0 runspercycle 1 tapecycle X (where X is the number of tape you have)
Re: Linux and Sun Solaris dump / restore FAILS with amanda
Thanks for the tip, dump has it's problems, and I only use GNU-tar with amanda because of those problems. Anyway, why didn't you use amverify on the tapes? Wouldn't it have prevented this disaster? On Wednesday 16 January 2002 14:11, you wrote: Hi all, I don't normally post like this to any list, but recent experience (and the pain thereof) prompted me to try and help others avoid what happened to me. I've been using amanda for over a year in a production setting. It's worked fine for the once-in-a-while single or multiple file-recovery. But recently I had to try and do a full restore from a tape and it failed miserably. What's worse, after inspecting the archive of tapes that I have, not one of the dump images was complete and valid. Going back through the amanda log files and email'd reports, I never found errors for the tapes that gave me problems, but nontheless, the data on the tapes was useless. Every dump archive was incomplete. I encourage all amanda users to restrict themselves to using GNU-tar. While it doesn't save i-node information, it's very rare that you need this in a recovery scenario. All you really need is the file and meta data to do a recovery. With this in mind, and me still hurting from a disaster from which we could not recover, I changed our entire backup system to use GNU-tar instead of native dump utilities. Since then I 've done 3 complete restores and they were all successful. No one should have to lose data like that. I encourage all users to test their backups regularly. ESPECIALLY if you use native Linux/Sun dump utilties. I also found it interesting that even Linus Torvalds hates the dump utility and is lobbying to have it removed from all Linux distributions. For those who are curious, I manually inspected the useless dump archives on my tapes. I 'amrestore'd them to disk, and used an interactive restore to test their integrity. What I found is, while the data and listings index did exist on tape, the actual dump archive was always incomplete as if the backup ran out of spool space before it finished getting the dump archive from the server being backed up. Good Luck to all. Stephen. -- Brad Tilley PBK OUB Linux Systems Administrator Phone: 540.231.6277 Web: http://bursar.vt.edu Fax: 540.231.3238
Re: windows shares and security
On Thursday 14 February 2002 12:21, Gene Matthews wrote: I am assuming I have to share the directories from the windows boxes that I want to backup, which would imply turning on file and print sharing, right? That is correct. I always heard this was a big security hole. Is there a secure way to do this? Use a host based firwall like ZoneAlarm, it's free, and is a wonderfully simple IP filter. Also, password protect the shares on Win9x, or if it's 2000/NT/XP, only allow certain users access (amanda can mount the share as one of the allowed users). My tape server is off site and i'm waiting on someone to switch tapes for me now. Then I will test out what I have set up for now. amcheck seems to think all is well. I have /etc/amandapass entries for the shares //windowsbox/C$. Can I use the C$ share for the entire drive/partition? I do on some 9x clients. They swap file always returns an error, but that's to be expected. Any hints from someone backing up windows systems would be most appreciated. Some of the windows boxes I'm trying to backup have public IPs so I would like to have as much security as possible. All my Windows PCs are on a public network. They all run ZoneAlarm. The 9x machines have full shares that are passwd protected. The NT/2000/XP PCs are joined to a domain that has a user named amanda. Only amanda can access the NT shares. -- Brad
nmap
Should an AMANDA client have port 10080 open? When I run nmap on my AMANDA server (which is also an AMANDA client) I only see ports 10082 amandaidx and 10083 amidxtape. Port 10080 is shown to be closed. Should 10080 be open? Thanks!
Re: amcheck FIXED!!!
On Thursday 07 February 2002 15:19, R. Bradley Tilley wrote: When I run su amanda -c amcheck daily the backup server times out with the selfcheck request timed out error. Believe it or not, this just started happening, and I _haven't_ changed anything. The funny part is this: amdump works fine and runs nightly! It backs-up the server, even tho amcheck says it's down. I'm using the latest stable version with RH7.2 The system has been running fine for the last month (it's only a test setup so this isn't that big of a problem). I have rechecked .amandahosts; made sure xinetd was setup properly; emptied the hosts.deny file. Added ALL: ALL to the hosts.allow file, I doubled the etimeout from 300 to 600, but amcheck still times out. Has anyone else ever encountered a similar problem? Thanks, Brad It was RH's fault!. I did an up2date on the rpm packages, and one of the packages overwrote my hosts file in /etc. When I recreated the hosts file as it was before the package upgrade, amanda worked fine! Lesson: Beware of updates!!! Do them, but be prepared to troubleshoot your apps because upgrades _can_ break things.
amcheck
When I run su amanda -c amcheck daily the backup server times out with the selfcheck request timed out error. Believe it or not, this just started happening, and I _haven't_ changed anything. The funny part is this: amdump works fine and runs nightly! It backs-up the server, even tho amcheck says it's down. I'm using the latest stable version with RH7.2 The system has been running fine for the last month (it's only a test setup so this isn't that big of a problem). I have rechecked .amandahosts; made sure xinetd was setup properly; emptied the hosts.deny file. Added ALL: ALL to the hosts.allow file, I doubled the etimeout from 300 to 600, but amcheck still times out. Has anyone else ever encountered a similar problem? Thanks, Brad
Re: amcheck
On Thursday 07 February 2002 15:19, R. Bradley Tilley wrote: When I run su amanda -c amcheck daily the backup server times out with the selfcheck request timed out error. Believe it or not, this just started happening, and I _haven't_ changed anything. The funny part is this: amdump works fine and runs nightly! It backs-up the server, even tho amcheck says it's down. I'm using the latest stable version with RH7.2 The system has been running fine for the last month (it's only a test setup so this isn't that big of a problem). I have rechecked .amandahosts; made sure xinetd was setup properly; emptied the hosts.deny file. Added ALL: ALL to the hosts.allow file, I doubled the etimeout from 300 to 600, but amcheck still times out. Has anyone else ever encountered a similar problem? Thanks, Brad I forgot to tell you guys that all the other AMANDA clients backup just fine. I have about 4 Linux servers, and 45 Windows PCs that AMANDA backs up. It's only the AMANDA backup server itself that times out. Thanks Again.
amrecover and /etc/hosts.allow
Hello All, After adding ALL: ALL to my /etc/hosts.deny file, amrecover stopped working. Before I go on, let me explain how I use amrecover; I never use it from the client, only from the server. I recover files and folders to a web directory on the amanda server and the clients pick them up thru the web or ftp. Each client has their own recovery directory on the server, and the server runs SSL to encrypt the data transfer. It's simple, and it works good in my situation. Anyway, amrecover stopped working after I added ALL: ALL to /etc/hosts.deny, even though the server's IP was included in /etc/hosts.allow. When I added ALL: 127.0.0.1 to /etc/hosts.allow everything worked fine again. Thought this might help others who have had this problem. Brad
Re: AMDUMP--newbie question
On Monday 04 February 2002 12:25, Alvaro Rosales R. wrote: Hi fellows, finnally I've got amanda running I have made some tests and I could see that amanda is what I was looking for, Now I want to make amanda use a tape per day but I want it to make full backups of my data each day I run it , How can I do this ?? Thanks in advance fo ryour answers in your amanda.conf file use these settings dumpcycle 0 runspercycle 1 tapecycle X (where X is the number of tape you have)
Re: What if ... ( the index under /var/amanda is gone )
Doesn't amreport email what tape was used, and what mount points were backed up at which level every night? My amreport email is sent to a seperate machine. Wouldn't this solve the problem? On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 at 10:15am, Andreas Baier wrote What do you do, in case there is a real emergency that you don´t have to figure out, on what tape which dump was written without having access to the index ??? A couple of things: 1) I use the lbl-templ keyword in my tapetype, which causes amanda to print out a tape label at the end of every run. The tape label lists all the filesystems that are on the tape and their levels. That way, I know what's on every tape without having to even put 'em in the drive. 2) I tar up all the relevant amanda config and information directories. Said tarball I put both in ~amanda on the amanda server and (via NFS) on our RAID (which is also backed up by amanda). So I've always got two copies of all the amanda info, up to date, on disk, plus on tape.
Re: Linux and Sun Solaris dump / restore FAILS with amanda
Thanks for the tip, dump has it's problems, and I only use GNU-tar with amanda because of those problems. Anyway, why didn't you use amverify on the tapes? Wouldn't it have prevented this disaster? On Wednesday 16 January 2002 14:11, you wrote: Hi all, I don't normally post like this to any list, but recent experience (and the pain thereof) prompted me to try and help others avoid what happened to me. I've been using amanda for over a year in a production setting. It's worked fine for the once-in-a-while single or multiple file-recovery. But recently I had to try and do a full restore from a tape and it failed miserably. What's worse, after inspecting the archive of tapes that I have, not one of the dump images was complete and valid. Going back through the amanda log files and email'd reports, I never found errors for the tapes that gave me problems, but nontheless, the data on the tapes was useless. Every dump archive was incomplete. I encourage all amanda users to restrict themselves to using GNU-tar. While it doesn't save i-node information, it's very rare that you need this in a recovery scenario. All you really need is the file and meta data to do a recovery. With this in mind, and me still hurting from a disaster from which we could not recover, I changed our entire backup system to use GNU-tar instead of native dump utilities. Since then I 've done 3 complete restores and they were all successful. No one should have to lose data like that. I encourage all users to test their backups regularly. ESPECIALLY if you use native Linux/Sun dump utilties. I also found it interesting that even Linus Torvalds hates the dump utility and is lobbying to have it removed from all Linux distributions. For those who are curious, I manually inspected the useless dump archives on my tapes. I 'amrestore'd them to disk, and used an interactive restore to test their integrity. What I found is, while the data and listings index did exist on tape, the actual dump archive was always incomplete as if the backup ran out of spool space before it finished getting the dump archive from the server being backed up. Good Luck to all. Stephen. -- Brad Tilley PBK OUB Linux Systems Administrator Phone: 540.231.6277 Web: http://bursar.vt.edu Fax: 540.231.3238
mt-st and RH72
FYI, RH72 will install AMANDA and all the necessay components _except_ the mt-st package! You have to go back and manually install it.
amrecover
Hello Everyone, I have about 60 MS clients that AMANDA backs up. I had trouble figuring out the best way to offer individual/small file recovery to the users until a friend suggested that I install apache on the AMANDA server and do recovery thru the web. The apache web server has a directory for each user. Each directory is passwd protected, and apache uses SSL to encrypt the data transfer. I've found that the web works great if the user needs to recover 5-10 files, but I think large directories and multiple files would be better recovered thru ftp. Anyway, all I have to do is cd to the appropriate users web directory and run amrecover from there. I then email the user alerting them that their files are ready and will be available for the rest of the day, and that's it. I've written a small script to go thru and empty all the user directories each night. This setup seems to work pretty well, I was just curious as to how other admins handle MS file recovery?
smbclient question
I have about 60 MS clients, and currently, they are all mounted by smbclient through the AMANDA backup server. I have a few other Linux machines that are backed up too, and I was wondering if it would be better to spread these SAMBA mounts out across 2 or 3 other Linux machines. So, instead of mounting 60 MS clients on the Amanda server, spread the 60 out across 3 Linux machines. Or does it matter? Any advice is appreciated. -- Brad
failed smbclient dump
Hi guys and gals, I've been using AMANDA for about 2 weeks. I had my first dump failures last night. Here's what they look like: /-- reg//OUB1/complete lev 1 FAILED [/usr/bin/smbclient returned 1] sendbackup: start [reg://OUB1/complete level 1] sendbackup: info BACKUP=/usr/bin/smbclient sendbackup: info RECOVER_CMD=/usr/bin/smbclient -f... - sendbackup: info end | added interface ip=128.173.201.235 bcast=128.173.203.255 nmask=255.255.252.0 | added interface ip=192.168.1.44 bcast=192.168.1.255 nmask=255.255.255.0 ? protocol negotiation failed sendbackup: error [/usr/bin/smbclient returned 1] \ /-- reg//MRGRAY/complete lev 1 FAILED [/usr/bin/smbclient returned 1] sendbackup: start [reg://MRGRAY/complete level 1] sendbackup: info BACKUP=/usr/bin/smbclient sendbackup: info RECOVER_CMD=/usr/bin/smbclient -f... - sendbackup: info end | added interface ip=128.173.201.235 bcast=128.173.203.255 nmask=255.255.252.0 | added interface ip=192.168.1.44 bcast=192.168.1.255 nmask=255.255.255.0 ? Connection to MRGRAY failed sendbackup: error [/usr/bin/smbclient returned 1] \ The first one is an NT4 domain controller. The second is a win98se PC. Here's the odd part. Six other NT4 workstations, and 2 other win95 PCs dumped without any problems! All the machines have the exact same share (the entire c: drive same user/pass). Anyone else ever seen these errors? Thanks, Brad
Re: Amanda, Samba Excludes
On Wednesday 09 January 2002 09:45, Donhost Support wrote: Amanda with smbclient can't use excludes like Linux does. This is being addressed in the next several releases of Amanda. If you read the amanda.conf in your amanda directory, you'll notice that it points out that exclude options are silently ignored by dump and samba. I did read that and did note it, however docs/SAMBA says otherwise. It certainly does not silently ignore it because the backups fail with an exclude statement in amanda.conf. When I put just one file in the exclude statement in amanda.conf it works fine, the file is passed to smbclient and it is excluded from the backup. smbclient in itself supports excluding multiple files because I have invoked smbclient manually and excluded multiple files. I am missing something here? From what I understand, smbclient _only_ supports excluding a single directory/file from the command line. So, you could have an exclude in the dumtypes, but it's limited to one item. Could someone correct me here if I'm wrong?
