Monthly Status Updates/May 2007

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

Wiki Changes

Forums Discussions

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  • Jeanna Geier had problems setting up vtapes; it turned out most of her problems were from following an out-of-date HOWTO.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.

amanda-hackers

  • This month featured an extensive thread about testing started by [[email protected] Tobias Weingartner], with contributions from a large number of community members. After much discussion, the general consensus was that Amanda releases could use testing on a wider variety of platforms, architectures, and hardware. Jon Labadie suggested creating an automated test suite that users could run; Dustin Mitchell agreed, and said he was already working on an automated test environment for Zmanda and suggested integrating community testers into the suite. Jean-Louis Martineau proposed a Platform Experts program to coordinate testing and configuration for specific platforms. Since then, a number of users have signed up for a variety of platforms.
  • Mark Muehlfeld and Hasib reported networking problems with 2.5.2, which were addressed by Jean-Louis Martineau and Dustin Mitchell respectively.
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