amanda for DEBIAN ----------------- To configure your server, as root do: 1. for a simple setup edit the files (see explanations there) /etc/amanda/DailySet1/amanda.conf /etc/amanda/DailySet1/disklist /etc/amanda/crontab 2. prepare the holding disk if you use one by chown -R backup:backup 3. do crontab -u backup /etc/amanda/crontab.amanda To use all of Amanda's features, you may find it necessary to put each client machine's root user in the .rhosts or .amandahosts for ~backup on the server machine. On Debian systems, this is usually linked to /etc/amandahosts, but if you have clients running other operating systems you'll have to find the right place yourself. NOTE: If you want to backup your server too, you need to treat it as both a client *and* a server, see /usr/share/doc/amanda-client/README.Debian for more information. For more complex setups, consult the manpages and the extra documents and example files in /usr/share/doc/amanda-common, or look at www.amanda.org on the web. Another Note: if you use floppy tapes you have to use the sftape interface for use with ftape(>=3.03). Jean Pierre LeJacq reports the following about his experience using ftape: I'm using ftape successfully with amanda but only after struggling. The crucial trick was to set the block size with with ftmt to be the same as used by amanda. I've implemented this with this entry in /etc/modules.conf: alias char-major-27 zftape pre-install zftape /sbin/swapout 5 post-install zftape /bin/ftmt -f /dev/nzqft0 setblk 32768 To ease use with firewalls, Amanda has been built with options restricting the use of TCP to the port range 50000-50100, and UDP to the port range 840-860. Sam Johnston reported problems with an Amanda server on which bastille was used with the "restrict system resources" option. See bug 118616 in the Debian bug tracking system for more information. Concerns have been expressed about the reliability of 'dump' as a backup tool on live Linux systems. Nothing can guarantee a consistent and meaningful backup of a live filesystem under all circumstances. The tar utility is 'essential' in Debian and so will always be around, is not tied to any specific filesystem type, and there are entries in the default amanda.conf file defining dump types using tar.