Backup at CUBINlab

Introduction

Backup facilities are offered to workstation maintainers via the AMANDA suite of network backup tools. You will need to complete a number of tasks in order to get amanda working.

You will need to provide details of your disk layout to the backup administrator.

Also, we choose to use the 2.4 flavour of AMANDA. This is not backwardly compatible with earlier versions of AMANDA.

For FreeBSD systems

• Install the current AMANDA package or port. Follow the instructions provided with amanda's man pages.
• Tell the backup administrator your disk layout and machine name.

For Linux Systems

There have been problems with some Linux versions and distributions...

• Install the dump and flex rpms if you don't have them on your machine. The rpms can often be found on the cdrom holding your favorite distribution.
• Download the current release of the Amanda source code, unpack it in a temporary directory, and make the newly created amanda directory your current directory.
• run ./configure as follows:

      ./configure  --with-user=bin --with-group=disk
  

  This is much easier that trying to grab various binaries....and copying them into place.
• type `make install`
• add the follwing to your /etc/xinetd.conf file.

  service amanda
  {
          socket_type             = dgram
          protocol                = udp
          wait                    = yes
          user                    = bin
          server                  = /usr/local/libexec/amandad
          server_args             = amandad
          groups                  = yes
  }
  

• edit the /etc/group file adding user 'bin' to group 'disk' (permission errors otherwise)
• update /etc/services

  amanda          10080/udp  #Dump server control
  kamanda         10081/tcp
  kamanda         10081/udp
  amandaidx       10082/tcp  #Amanda indexing
  

• HUP your inetd process: killall -HUP xinetd
• check that your /dev/hda* files are readable by group disk.
• create a '/bin/.amandahosts' file containing

      emu.cubinlab.ee.unimelb.edu.au amanda
  

  with permission

      -rw-r--r--   1 root   root 
  

• Tell the backup administrator what your disk layout looks like.... (best obtained using `df -k`)
• Ask the backup administrator why it doesn't work...

Restoration Procedures

If you're silly enough to delete something you need, or have otherwise had a disaster, see the restoration guidelines