Backing up whole system

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 12:17 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Saturday 09 May 2009, Craig White wrote:
> >On Sat, 2009-05-09 at 11:28 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >> On Saturday 09 May 2009, GMS S wrote:
> >> >What is the best and easy way to backup whole fedora 10?
> >>
> >> Since you picked two, best, easy, and cheap (as in free) being a given,
> >> amanda installed from the tarball, NOT the rpms.  Easy might be relative
> >> though as there is some setup and configuration to do before you assign it
> >> all to the users crontab and forget it.  Trouble?  Subscribe to
> >> amanda-users at amanda.org. This is industrial grade stuff, used by some
> >> pretty big names.
> >
> >----
> >I thoroughly disagree with this. The reason you use a package management
> >system is to have readily packaged software so that you don't have to
> >deal with all of the various issues created by installing from tarballs.
> >
> >Amanda is packaged by Fedora and if Gene feels that the packages are
> >inadequate, he should be offering alternative packages for inclusion.
> >
> >Amanda is a PITA to set up and get running but so is Bacula, which is
> >what I use these days. Any feature comprehensive backup program is a
> >PITA to set up. But there is no reason not to use rpm packaging for
> >either amanda or bacula.
> >
> >Craig
> 
> Sorry Craig, now you are walking on ground I am very familiar with, but 
> fedora's rpm is/was incapable of handling the nuances of using only enough 
> access rights to get the job done, a vital part of the amanda security model.
> 
> When an rpm package can build a complete user from scratch, and preserve the 
> file rights exactly as they are when built from a tarball, then a 'pre-canned' 
> version of amanda rpm's that works as well as the tarball might be possible.
> 
> But lets ask the rpm experts, which I am not that well versed in.
> 
> I don't believe it is with the current rpm packager but I'm open to correction 
> since I haven't looked at the F10 packages other than to see they are old (to 
> me that is, 2.6.0p2 is ancient).  I'm currently running the May 5th date 
> snapshot of amanda-2.6.2alpha because I play the coal miners canary for amanda 
> and have for years.  It works as expected, very well.
----
Do you really believe that rpm can install every package under the sun,
from base libraries to sophisticated daemons, create users, generate
security contexts, create folders, set privileges, run install/uninstall
scripts and with the help of yum, automatically resolve and install
dependent packages and not do everything necessary to install amanda?

You already stated the answer...you don't know what you're doing when it
comes to rpm. Don't glorify your lack of knowledge with the fact that
you're using some alpha version. The simple fact is that Fedora, like
all Red Hat systems, like virtually all Linux distributions has a
package management system and it doesn't make sense for you to encourage
others to use source tarballs because you can't possibly help them with
package management.

Craig


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.