SAMBA digest 1809

[Alexandre Oliva]

Richard L Hoesly <Rich-Hoesly at uai.com> writes:

> Try looking at a backup package called AMANDA. It if free and
> has a great support structure much like SAMBA.

Thanks for the ad :-)

> Home page is at www.cs.umd.edu/projects/amanda/amanda.html.

Please refer to it as www.amanda.org, it's easier to remember :-)

> I use if for all my UNIX and PC's and it works great.

Unfortunately, not that well for M$Window.  Due to SAMBA limitations
(or should I say M$Windows limitations :-), it is impossible to back
up system disks, for example: smbclient can't back up locked files
such as the system registry and PAGEFILE.SYS (but why would you want
to back up a swap area, anyway? :-)

But it's great for backing up data disks, except that it won't back up
access control lists: you need a special proprietary tool, distributed
with the MS Network Resource Kit, that dumps the ACL information to a
file, which can then be backed up with Amanda+SAMBA.  There's another
tool that will dump registry information to a file, so that it can
also be backed up.


My general advice is: if you can, set up all your data and application
servers in Linux boxes with SAMBA, and forget about backing up
M$Windows clients.  If anything goes wrong with them, it's much easier
to reinstall the system from scratch and update its configuration from
a working host with sysdiff.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva
mailto:oliva at dcc.unicamp.br mailto:aoliva at acm.org
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil