Monthly Status Updates/August 2007

August was a quiet month for public Amanda development, as Zmanda engineers continued work on a number of large changes such as the Device API and Application API and prepared for further architectural refactoring.

Wiki Changes

• Tfinn added a wishlist entry about native mirroring of backups to multiple storage media. At the moment this is only possible using RAIT, which has some drawbacks.
• Choogendyk added a new tapetype entry for Sony AIT-5 400GB tapes.
• Paddy made minor changes to the MySQL Backup and Recovery and No index records for host-disk articles.

Discussion Fora

Zmanda Forums

This month the team provided forums support to lots of new users. Especial thanks to Andrew Rakowski for his community contributions. In total, Jean-Louis Martineau, Sachin Kale, Dustin Mitchell, Pavel Pragin, Sunil Sawant, Paddy Sreenivasan, and Kevin Till all helped out.

Mailing Lists

amanda-users

This list exists primarily for support, and there was lots of it this month. The supporters were unusually diverse this time, with over 20 contributors, including Joshua Baker-LePain, Paul Bijnens, Brian Cuttler, Gene Haskett, Patrick M. Hausen, Chris Hoogendyk, Matt Hyclak, Aaron Grier, Jon Labadie, Jay Lessert, Jean-Francois Malouin, Dustin J. Mitchell, Marc Muehlfeld, Steve Newcomb, Charlie Reitsma, Donald Ritchey, Mario Silva, Frank Smith, Mauricio Tavares, Skylar Thompson, Greg Troxel, Geert Uytterhoeven, and Stefan G. Weichinger. Kai Zimmer

In addition, Mitch Collinsworth, Chris Hoogendyk and Jon LaBadie discussed a way to integrate client initiated backup. This discussion went on in parallel on the amanda-hackers list, below.

amanda-hackers

The discussion on client initated backup started by Mitch Collinsworth on the amanda-users list continued here, with additional contributions by Greg Troxel and Dustin J. Mitchell. Dustin suggested that this might be a good Google Summer of Code project. Additional wishlist discussions on mirroring and scheduling were led by and contributed from Paul Bijnens, Aaron J. Grier, Chris Hoogendyk, Matt Hyclak, Jon Labadie, Jean-Louis Martineau, Christopher McCrory, Marc Mengal, Dustin J. Mitchell and Frank Smith. At this time, however, none of these discussions led to a patch.

Dustin J. Mitchel started a discussion thread on the use of threads in Amanda. Dustin wanted to know if it was OK to require threading support in future versions of Amanda. At the end of the month, the discussion was still ongoing, but an emerging consensus appeared to support mandatory threads as long as the threaded code was well-tested, optional on the client, and it remains possible to perform a manual restore without thread support. Dissenting voices included Aaron J. Grier, who expressed doubts that threads were a useful development paradigm at all and dismay at introducing new library dependencies, and Marc W. Mengel, who was uncertain about the permanence of threading APIs and skeptical about threaded restores on very old hardware.

Although the amanda-hackers list is primarily about development, there was additionally some user support provided by Jean-Louis Martineau, Dustin J. Mitchell and Greg Troxel.

Code Changes

Among numerous small fixes and tweaks:

• Stefan G. Weichinger noticed that 'amadmin Conf balance' output was misaligned; Dustin J. Mitchell committed a fix (r425)
• Jean-Louis Martineau improved restore's performance by removing an unecessary fast-forward operation (r427)
• Chris Hoogendyk and Olivier Nicole suggested better documentation for the -o configuration-override option (r429)
• Paul Bijnens and Dimitri Gorokhovik submitted patches for bugs in chg-multi.sh (r431 and r442)
• Dustin J. Mitchell fixed problems finding 'mt' and 'mtx' in chg-zd-mtx.sh (r438)
• Dustin J. Mitchell modified all Amanda shell scripts to function correctly if internationalization support is not available (r444)
• Terry Burton submitted an updated DLT tape label template (r452).

Jean-Louis Martineau is working behind the scenes on the Application API, and Ian Turner is putting the finishing touches on the Device API. Hopefully, next month's status update will highlight the release of the Device API!