Monthly Status Updates/May 2007

May 2007 saw the release of Amanda 2.5.2, which was followed by a flurry of discussion and development activity.

Wiki Changes

• Taper scan algorithm was supplemented with additional text, mostly by User:Choogendyk, with some additional contributions from User:Ian.
• The new Coding Guidelines portal, mostly written by User:Dustin, provides information useful to new Amanda developers about various generally useful functions available in the codebase.
• User:Dustin expanded and organized the User documentation, Developer documentation, Amanda log files, and Installation portals and linked pages, with help from User:Chogendyk.
• The new Platform Experts program started to take off, with six registered experts agreeing to test 10 platforms.
• The new How To Help page by User:Dustin provides an outlet for new contributors of all strokes.
• User:Paul.bijnens wrote some text about the "Warning - block NNN is beyond the end of DEVICE" message from dump.
• User:Dustin ported a large number of FAQs from the amanda.org documentation and performed significant work on the Amanda Index, Curinfo, and Encryption articles.

Forums Discussions

• A few users had their issues resolved, most notably:
  • gregc had problems restoring on Windows; these were addressed by martineau and paddy.
  • swsisrom had some problems with backup and restore and questions about performance on his large (7TB) installation using split dumps. These were addressed by martineau, dustin, ggrant, Sachin, and ktill'.

Mailing List Discussions

amanda-users

• Richard Stockton reported problems running Amanda 2.5.2 on Solaris resulting from the new IPV6 code. Jean-Louis Martineau provided a fix.
• There was some discussion about testing of tapes using amverify or tape monitoring. Lewis Donofrio posed the initial question; Gene Heskett pointed out that the act of running amverify will actually increase the likelihood of tape failure, Jon Labadie pointed out that one could use snapshots to confirm data integrity in the presence of a changing data source and that there is no substitute for trained and tested restore procedures, and Chris Hoogendyk wrote some text about the proper statistical sampling technique to use when estimating the tape failure rate.
• Peter Bowman reported a number of problems running Amanda 2.5.2 on an old IRIX installation (6.5.4m, released May 1999); Jean-Louis Martineau fixed these in collaboration with the reporter.
• Steven Backus and Christopher McCrory reported problems with Autoflush, which were fixed by Jean-Louis Martineau.
• Brian Cuttler asked a question about the right version of GNU tar on Solaris; Dustin Mitchell provided links to various precompiled versions and pointed out that Amanda looks for gtar (not tar) in its path at runtime if it can't find an absolute location at configure time. Brian tried tar 1.13, but it turned out to be buggy, so Jon Labadie pointed out that tar 1.13.19 or 1.13.25 are a safer bet that vanilla 1.13, but Brain ended up successful with tar 1.15.91. Stephan Weichinger suggested the possibility of detecting good and bad versions of tar at runtime, but no further progress was made.
• Olivier Nicole started a discussion about hot-swappable hard disks for vtapes. Kai Zimmer suggested eSata as being cheap, reliable, and easy to replace; Dustin Mitchell suggested that a FireWire enclosure provides good performance and reliability at a reasonable price; Jon Labadie brought up the possibility of a removable IoMega device; and Geert Uytterhoeven suggested that Olivier should be able to get much better performance with his existing configuration.
• Jeanna Geier had problems setting up vtapes; it turned out most of her problems were from following an out-of-date HOWTO. Her configuration was also confused by the presence of the GNU 'backup' tool, which is different from the dump-like tool of the same name. Stephan Weichinger, [[email protected] Robert Echlin], [[email protected] Paul Bijnens], and Dustin Mitchell all offered their help.