Monthly Status Updates/September 2007
New Development
The end of September saw the long-awaited merge of the Device API to the Subversion repository, and the beginning of testing for this significant change. The Device API implements an object-oriented pluggable backend for data-storage devices. The set of available devices is identical to that available before, although all have been re-implemented from the ground up. Supporting the implementation of the Device API, we have adopted GLib as a low-level utility library. GLib takes care of many portability issues, supplies many useful data structures, and supports object-oriented programming in C.
Marc Muehlfeld proposed a patch to amdump to produce more useful error output. The patch generated some discussion and a second revision. Hopeully the third revision will be committed in early October.
A number of other significant changes are also in the works -- tune in to the amanda-hackers list to help out!
Discussion Fora
As usual, the Zmanda Forums and Mailing Lists played host to Amanda's active supporting community. Among the highlights were:
- An in-depth discussions on interfacing a StorEdge L9 and a Sun
- GNU Tar incorrectly thinking all files on a filesystem have changed when the filesystem's device number changes -- this was discovered several months ago by Gene Heskett and attributed to Linux' propensity for changing device numbers, but John E Hein saw the same problem on an OpenBSD machine.
- Backing up MySQL databases consistently (a perennial favorite)
- Running Amanda on Mac OS X