Home network backup solutions?

[Reid Rivenburgh]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 10:50 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Reid Rivenburgh wrote:
>  > Hi.  I have a small network at home consisting of one wired, always-on
>  > F8 desktop (mine), a roving Mac laptop running OS X, and a rarely-on
>  > Windows XP laptop.  The laptops are wireless.  I also have a new 500
>  > GB external hard drive that some of you may remember.  The Mac user
>  > was thinking about getting a drive for herself to do backups using
>  > Time Machine or whatever Apple's backup app is.  But we figured there
>  > ought to be a way to backup to my desktop/hard drive.  I looked around
>  > and found BackupPC.  It sounds like it'd do the job, if I could figure
>  > it out.  (I'm having trouble discovering the Mac on the network
>  > [doesn't respond to nmblookup], and I have a feeling if I can get past
>  > that, I will have additional trouble getting rsync or tar to work
>  > there....)  I thought I'd check here to see if there's anything else
>  > out there that would work.  Ideally, it would be transparent to the
>  > clients, automatic when they're on the network, incremental....  You
>  > know, um, everything BackupPC does!  Free and open source would be
>  > best....
>
>  If it is your network you shouldn't have to 'discover' it. The simple
>  fix is to configure your dhcp server to always give the same IP
>  addresses to the same MAC addresses and then either put the addresses
>  and names in the backuppc's hosts file or set up local DNS service.
>  There shouldn't be any problem running ssh, rsync, or tar on a Mac.
>  Many people on the backuppc mail list are backing up macs, so ask there
>  if you run into any problems.

I've made a lot of progress on this.  My router seems flaky about
assigning reserved IP addresses, but that's supposed to work.  A
fedora-specific issue, though, is that I get an error when I try to
use compression with BackupPC.  Here's a little test perl program that
demonstrates:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Compress::Zlib;

% ./compress-test.pl
is only avaliable with the XS version at
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Compress/Zlib.pm line 9
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/Compress/Zlib.pm line 9.
Compilation failed in require at ./date-test.pl line 2.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./date-test.pl line 2.

Bug 434574 sounds related.  I guess I can wait for this to get fixed
and just not use compression in the meantime.  Or do you know of a
workaround...?

Thanks,
reid