amandas group membership in FC6?

[David G. Miller]

Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Saturday 25 November 2006 13:37, David G. Miller wrote:
>   
>> Gene Heskett wrote:
>>     
Lots of stuff deleted since the conversation has drifted...
>>> Useing kde-3.5.5, I didn't notice that option in the tools supplied.
>>> There was Kusr, and something called user manager.  But the first time
>>> I just ran 'adduser amanda'.
>>>       
>> See Anne's recent post and correction.  system-config-users lets you
>> manipulate group membership, etc.
>>     
>
> I'll have to join the chorus of objections here.  That tool doesn't seem 
> to be available anyplace on the kmenu.  If thats the 'approved' tool to 
> do that, then it needs to be a heck of a lot more accessible than buried 
> someplace in an sbin directory that you have to issue a 'locate 
> system-config' and see what falls out with a name that *might* indicate 
> it what you want.
>   
KDE may not see fit to include it since it's gnome-ish.  It's Red Hat's 
standard user/group config tool.  Found with others of it's ilk in:

[root at bend ~]# which system-config-users
/usr/bin/system-config-users
>   
>>>> Dumb question: why didn't you just do a "yum install amanda
>>>> amanda-client"?  It's much easier than building amanda and manually
>>>> setting up the user, etc.
>>>>         
>>> 2 reasons,
>>> 1) whats in the repos is often a year or more out of date, and due to
>>> the restrictions of the rpm packaging system usually has permission
>>> problems that can only be sorted correctly by nuking the rpm and
>>> following the build instructions to install the tarball.  This is the
>>> first time I've had problems installing a tarball in 6 years!
>>>
>>> 2) I'm one of the canaries in this particular coal mine, I make and
>>> install the new snapshots as often as Jean-Louis releases them, so if
>>> there are any gotcha's I can report back the next day on their lists.
>>> Thats one of my contributions to your having the worlds best backup
>>> software.
>>>       
>> I like my backup software to be VERY stable so I'll put up with whatever
>> Fedora decides is sufficiently stable to include in their distro.
>>     
>
> Fedora has taken perfectly good code, and broke it all to hell making it 
> fit in the rpm format, on several occasions.  Often the packager doesn't 
> use it himself, and has no idea how to go about throwing it out in the 
> street to see if it can survive in traffic.  Sorry if thats a bit too 
> candid an opinion, but back when I wanted to start using it, I screwed 
> around with whatever version was in rpm at the time for almost 3 months 
> fighting with perms, finally discovering the mailing list, and got 
> instructions on how to build it.  The result worked the first night.  And 
> every night since except for an obscure bug that effected several 
> snapshots in a row last spring, and a typo in the srcs of two snapshots, 
> probably 5 & 2 years ago.  Stable?  Yes, very.  We have 10x the trouble 
> with gnu.org's ongoing screwing with tar, to the extent we now have a 
> list of tars that work and tars that will not recover.  In that regard, 
> amanda is many times more stable that tar.  But you folks always think 
> tar is stable, so you go get the last release, make an rpm out of it, and 
> apparently never actually test it in the real world.  We do.  Every 
> night...
>
> >From time to time one of the packagers checks into the list, and tries to 
> understand the problems.  But then like smoke in a whirlwind, gone again 
> for 2 years or more because we think this is a great time to get amanda 
> fixed, but your packager has thin skin & boogies.  To get an idea of what 
> it can do today, go get the latest snapshot from Jean-Louis's site at 
> umontreal, link near bottom of page at amanda.org, unpack it, and read 
> the ChangeLog.  I don't even know if it goes back as far as the version 
> fedora is currently shipping, but a lot of new capabilities have been 
> added since then, with the only backwards breakage being the timestamps 
> which once enabled in the wider format aren't compatible with 
> pre-timestamped archives that have only a date stamp.
>
>   
I seem to have hit a hot button.  I haven't had any trouble with the 
amanda rpms.  I'm currently running the server under CentOS 4.4 and 
clients under Fedora 6 plus backing up my wife's Windoze box as a samba 
share.  About the only PITA was getting the tape changer configured 
since it's really an HP changer (C1557A) that Sun resells.
>> With regard to this problem:
>>     
>>> [amanda at coyote GenesAmandaHelper-0.5]$ ls -l /mnt/hdb/home
>>> total 36
>>> drwxr-xr-x 21     33 disk   4096 Nov  8 23:37 amanda
>>> drwx------  3 amanda amanda 4096 Nov  9  2004 elladene
>>> drwx------ 14    502    502 4096 Nov 12  2002 elmer
>>> drwx------ 36 gene   gene   4096 Nov  9 16:32 gene
>>> drwx------  2 root   root   4096 Oct 22  2002 lost+found
>>> drwx------  3    503    503 4096 Nov 21  2002 roadrunner
>>> drwxr-xr-x 18 gene   gene   4096 Aug 14 03:42 shop
>>> drwxr-xr-x 19   1000   1000 4096 Aug 13  2004 shop-gene
>>> drwxr-xr-x  6   1002   1002 4096 Dec 14  2005 spamd
>>>       
>> find provides a mechanism for finding all of the files with a particular
>> UID or GID and then doing whatever you'd like with them.  Something
>> along the lines of:
>>
>> find / -uid 33 -exec chown amanda:disk {} \; -print
>>
>> The predicate -gid can be used with numeric group IDs.  If you want to
>> confirm the changes, use -ok instead of -exec.
>>     
>
> Valid for the FC2 tree's, amanda is 501 on FC6.  I probably am overdoing 
> it, but I (root) just 'chown -R amanda:disk *' from inside 
> the /home/amanda dir.
>
> Point taken though.  Thanks.
>   
Just change the numeric UID or GID as needed.  Also, I think amanda 
likes to have some of the stuff under /etc/amanda owned by the amanda 
user.  But that could be a Red Hat-ism.  501 is probably what you get 
for a UID by creating the user through one of the regular user 
management tools.  Amanda is still user 33 on my clean FC6 install.  
It's usually a good idea to have system users like amanda have a UID 
outside of the normal user range.

Cheers,
Dave

-- 
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
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