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
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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
-
