dump and ext3

[Ed Wilts]

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 11:37:28PM +0930, Malcolm Kay wrote:
> On Friday 02 July 2004 08:55, Ed Wilts wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 02:14:48AM +0930, Malcolm Kay wrote:
> 
> >
> > > From these I gather dump might work sometimes but is generally
> > > messy and unreliable.
> > >
> > > I would have expected that backup would be have been a stable
> > > and core part of any system.
> >
> > It is.  Just because dump doesn't work doesn't mean that backups aren't
> > stable.  dump is just a distributor-supplied utility.
> 
> I am told, perhaps wrongly, that linux is a kernel only and that I need 
> distributor-supplied utilities to make a real OS. So just which
> distributor-supplied utilities make up the core OS?
> 
> On most unix systems dump/restore are a part of the core OS. 

What defines a core OS is rather weird these days, especially in the
Linux arena.  What constitutes "Linux" is an argument I'm not prepared
to undertake today.  The Red Hat offerings include what you might
consider "the core OS" but they get their pieces from many places.  This
is true of every Unix offering and sometimes other non-Unix platforms
too (for example, my VMS TCP/IP stack comes from BSD.  I believe that
Microsoft has some BSD stuff in places too).

By looking at the rpm information, you can frequently find out where
they get their utilities from and work your way through there.  
# rpm -qf /sbin/dump
This tells you that this image comes from the dump rpm.
# rpm -qi dump
Now you know that the home page for dump is http://dump.sourceforge.net
  
> > > I must say your responses have left me in something of a
> > > quandary. While one might set up some exotic backup mechanism
> > > it is not really very convenient to have to treat 2 linux
> > > machines in a network of 25 or so as special cases.

I may have mispoken on my response.  That's a page on the web site
listed above that talks about what I quoted (from Linus 3 years ago) and
what the dump developers think.  You can read that page and make your
own decision on what you want to use:
http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program