[K12OSN] Refining the script....more help? *please?*

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2004-11-22 at 00:03, David Trask wrote:

> >And, of course, I'll take this opportunity to remind you that if you
> >had backuppc running, you would already have copies of everything that
> >you could restore with a couple of clicks on a web page...
> 
> ++++++++++
> AMEN....keep after us on this one Les  :-)  I plan to give it a try in a
> week or so....gotta get throught the holiday and a big conference.  I
> actually loaded it on an Ubuntu laptop, but haven't had the chance to
> figure out what to do from there.  Do you have or can you point me to a
> good How-To on installing it on a Fedora (or even a K12LTSP) box?  I'm
> running K12LTSP 4.1 with FC2.

The on-line docs are pretty good - it is just a perl script that needs
a few other modules.  Perl has it's own CPAN installer that will do
the grunge work easier than the several-step download process they
describe.  You can just"
perl -MCPAN -eshell
(at the prompt): install Compress::Zlib Archive::Zip File::RsyncP

The only RH/fedora quirks are that you need to be sure you have
the perl-suidperl package installed and follow the instructions in the
init.d/README file to copy linux-backuppc to /etc/init.d/backuppc and
do the chkconfig operations to make it start at bootup.

Ignore the part about using mod_perl because you really won't use the
web interface that much once it starts doing everything automatically
and mod_perl can't run suid programs so it is harder to set up.

> I need the total how-to....including any
> other stuff I need to install such as rsync or whatever.

Usually everything else you need is already installed on the clients.
A possible exception is if you want to do windows clients over a
low-bandwidth connection.  Then you would drop in the windows version
of rsync.

> Or can I do
> simple NFS backups?  How does it deal with RAID setups?  I've got 4 drives
> with varying RAID 1 and 0 paritions and devices.  Will it preserve all
> that? 

It will give you back a tar image with the right command line invocation
which means you can get one delivered over the network via ssh.  It is
up to you to have prepared a suitable filesystem for extraction and the
raid underneath that is irrelevant (but you can do those things with a
knoppix CD or fedora install CD in rescue mode).

> I simply want to restore with a few clicks should I ever need
> disaster recovery.  I wish it could be as easy as backing up and SME
> server  :-)

If you can the procedure beyond the tar image you have to
plan your disasters carefully so you have exactly the same
hardware to re-install on afterwords, including the same size
drives and same raid controllers.   You can restore the tar image
to anything you want, although if the disk controllers are drastically
different you might have to do some extra work to make it boot.  For
the more common and less drastic situation where someone accidentally
deletes or overwrites a file or directory  and doesn't notice for a few
days, it will be just a few clicks to put it back.  Or if you screw up
a config file edit and want to see what it looked like yesterday, you
can view it from the web interface.


---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com