[372] in Athena_Backup_System
"E. Jay Berkenbilt": backups
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue Feb 18 11:44:24 1997
To: athena-backup@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 11:44:12 EST
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
My usual analysis of software written by ejb is "interesting, but not
quite the design I want," but a backup system is a different breed of
fish. So maybe people want to look into this.
------- Forwarded Message
Received: from PACIFIC-CARRIER-ANNEX.MIT.EDU by po10.MIT.EDU (5.61/4.7) id AA00599; Tue, 18 Feb 97 11:27:55 EST
Received: from Through.ApexInc.COM by MIT.EDU with SMTP
id AA16605; Tue, 18 Feb 97 11:27:37 EST
Received: (from mail@localhost) by through.apexinc.com (8.7.4/8.7.3.1) id MAA06319 for <sipb-staff@mit.edu>; Tue, 18 Feb 1997 12:22:06 -0500
Received: from apex.ads.apexinc.com(192.168.0.1) by through.apexinc.com via smap (V1.3)
id sma006315; Tue Feb 18 12:21:50 1997
Received: from soup.ads.apexinc.com (Soup.ADS.ApexInc.COM [192.168.0.5]) by apex.ADS.ApexInc.COM (8.7.4/APEXINC-SERVER-1.0-ADS-1.6) with ESMTP id LAA04902; Tue, 18 Feb 1997 11:25:53 -0500
Received: (from ejb@localhost) by soup.ads.apexinc.com (8.8.4/APEXINC-CLIENT-1.0) id LAA05180; Tue, 18 Feb 1997 11:30:07 -0500
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 11:30:07 -0500
Message-Id: <199702181630.LAA05180@soup.ads.apexinc.com>
From: "E. Jay Berkenbilt" <ejb@ql.org>
To: sipb-staff@MIT.EDU
Subject: backups
Please forward this as appropriate if I've messed up on choosing the
right list....
For those who don't know me, I was an active SIPB member during the
1988--1991 period (when I was qjb@mit.edu [or qjb@athena.mit.edu]) and
was involved in the early days of setting up the sipb AFS cell. I
also helped with backups some of the time.
I have written a (free) backup program in perl that SIPB may find
useful. It requires perl 5.002 or later, and is accompanied by a
fairly extensive users manual. The software is written in an
extensible fashion, and the interface for extending it is documented
well enough that an accomplished perl programmer with a bent toward
system administration shouldn't have any trouble extending it. Here's
a quick overview of its capabilities. If you're interested in using
this for the SIPB backups, I'd be willing to provide some assistance.
Basically, my backup software, entitled qbackup, is essentially a
sophisticated scheduling and tape management program that can kick off
multiple backups on the same tape, mixing incremental backups and full
backups, and it can use any number of "backup modules" that implement
the actual backup. I have two modules currently implemented: one
using dump and restore, and another using qsync, a package I wrote to
synchronize a file system against a flat-file database of another file
system's contents (among other things). This software also has the
capability to back up SMB shares (Windows) using a slightly patched
smbclient (from the samba suite) program. (The patch has been
submitted to the samba developers.) I've been using this software for
a few years to back up about 100 GB of space over several different
installations.
This is free software, and is used by several people, all of whom know
me personally. I'd like to get it a little wider exposure, and I
think that SIPB using this software could be mutually beneficial.
Someone would have to write a module to perform the AFS backups using
qbackup, and once this was done, the backup process could probably be
completely automated.
If you are interested in more details, or want a copy of the software,
please let me know. I don't have any copyright or license file
included with this, but if I release it to a wider audience, it will
probably be under the terms of Larry Wall's Artistic License.
- --
E. Jay Berkenbilt (ejb@ql.org) | Member, League for Programming Freedom
http://www.ql.org/q/ | lpf@uunet.uu.net, http://www.lpf.org
------- End of Forwarded Message
