[2449] in Release_7.7_team
Re: ADSM scheduled backup - a bit long- sorry
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Mon Oct 16 12:06:09 2000
Message-Id: <200010161606.MAA28791@dit.mit.edu>
To: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, release-team@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 15 Oct 2000 17:55:58 EDT."
<200010152155.RAA23418@Bearing-An-Hourglass.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2000 12:06:04 -0400
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
>> 1. exclude filesystems like /usr/vice/cache on SGI, /var/usr/vice, /,
>> /usr on Suns (and similarly for Linux).
>You may also want to exclude /proc and /dev/fd on solaris, depending
>on whether they are sufficiently special that ADSM would ignore them
>anyway.
If I exclude / I think they would be excluded automatically. Otherwise I
will need to exclude them explicitly.
>I would not exclude / on any platforms. It contains a lot of config
>files that someone may want to recover.
Well, this gets into the philosophy of what we want users to be
backing up and restoring. In our prior (non-scheduled) ADSM use, we
were essentially telling users- "use it only to back up your local
stuff in /var/local- everything else is part of the Athena release and
you shouldn't back up and restore things there or you might break the
release." We can stick to this philosophy or change it, but if I put /
back as a file system, then things like /kernel, /opt (and so on) on
Solaris get automatically backed up too so then I need to exclude them
as directories... this gets to be a considerable pain. It's very easy
for users to back up lots of stuff that they might restore of top of a
later Athena release- I'm concerned about that.
Note that any user can override the default settings by editing a
configuration file. So maybe we can say, "we have set conservative
defaults that only back up what is in /var/local; if you know what you
are doing and read the TSM manual and edit the default configuration
file we make for you, you can back up system directories (like /etc and so on)
but be careful with what you are doing because restoring something that
is incompatible with a later Athena release than your backup might break
things" or something similar.
>I would exclude any file named srvtab, krb5.keytab, ssh_host_key,
>ssh_host_key.pub, and ssh_random_seed. I would also exclude /tmp,
>/var/tmp, and /var/rtmp. Most of these exclusions are to prevent
>cryptographic secrets from going over the net in the clear.
Yes- good idea. Are these always in a standard place or could they be
put elsewhere?
>> 2. exclude all non /var top level directories (like /etc, /dev etc.).
>/etc in particular contains lots of config files (and generally isn't
>too big)
Well, same comments as for / above...
>> 3. exclude some /var directories we don't want backed up (like /var/boot,
>> /var/dmedia etc. on SGI, likewise for Sun and Linux).
>We probbaly want /var/server on this list.
>We may want /var/sadm on it on Solaris.
I was actually going to include everything under /var except /var/local,
in line with the philosophy that "we only want to back up /var/local by
default". We can change this philopsophy if the majority feel that way...
A.
