Hello Ed,
Monday, November 22, 1999, 7:46:14 PM, you wrote:
Lazor> Which software packages do you use to interact with your cd-rom
Lazor> burner and the DDS3 tape backup unit?
I use XCDRoast almost exclusively, which is basically just a front end
to the mkisofs and cdrecord command line utilities. It's a pretty
nice GUI for mastering CD-R and CD-RW discs though. The one thing
I've not found under Linux so far is a utility to erase a CD-RW, for
reuse. For that I've been using the Adaptec software under Windows,
unfortunately.
For backups, I have a Seagate Scorpion 24 DDS3 tape drive (12GB/24GB
with DDS3 hardware compression). I run some home-brew shell scripts
using cron, that do a full backup over the weekend (Sunday night),
followed by incremental backups appended to the same tape on Monday -
Thursday nights. The contents of each backup get logged to a file
with a name like full-Thursday-11221999.log, etc. I have the script
eject the tape after the Thursday night backup. A couple of
technicians in the office are tasked with insuring that the tape gets
cycled to the next one in my 12 week rotation on Fridays. They are
required to sign a log hanging on the wall over the server, to show
that the tape was changed, and which tape it was. This is a primitive
system, but it works, and gives me a pretty good snapshop of
everything going back 12 weeks. I used to archive a quarterly or
monthly tape to a safe deposit box at the bank - but with the advent
of CD-RW drives, we just use a PC to make a snapshot of important
stuff like our CVS repository, and sent the CD's over to the safe
deposit box after major software releases.
You can buy commercial software to do your backups under Linux. I used
to use a fairly complex commercial system that originally was bundled
with Caldera Network Desktop 1.0 - but found to my dismay that I had
trouble restoring tapes if I didn't have the backup catalog online on
the disk! Sorta hard to do after a hard drive failure! At least with
tar, I can see what's on the tape.
Lazor> Because of budget constraints, I'll be configuring a single
Lazor> box for serving e-mail, web, file serving (via Samba), printing,
Lazor> DNS, cd-rom burning, and data archival and retrieval. ugh.
Exactly what I've got 4 Linux network servers doing, in 4 separate
offices. The lightest load is the one here at my home-office, but
I've got systems doing all of that for up to 50 users, without
breaking a sweat. Not the cd-rom burning bit though.
Lazor> Most of the normal administration will be easy. If they want
Lazor> a new user setup for e-mail, or they want to add a workstation
Lazor> to the network, they will have me set things up.
I've got a few people trained on how to use Linuxconf and Samba's SWAT
tools from their PC's WWW browser, so I don't have to do every single
little system task like add users...
Lazor> The main area that I'll be concerned with is the use of the cd-rom
Lazor> burner and the tape backup software. Specifically, I'm wondering
Lazor> which approach will be the best for letting end users work with
Lazor> the cd-rom burner and the tape backup unit.
Ah. Here's the catch. The one caveat to running cdrecord or XCDRoast
under Linux: at least with the default setup on Redhat, Mandrake or
Caldera, is this. It requires you be logged into the system as root
in order to run! You don't want that on your network server. Now, it
MAY be possible to change the default permissions on the CD-RW device
(/dev/scd1 on my desktop here), but I've not tried that.
Lazor> There will be added benefits for me as the admin if I can put the
Lazor> cd-rom burner on the server. On the flip side, there may be
Lazor> enough hassles with end-user's trying to use it that I'll end up
Lazor> putting it on a workstation and calling it good. Any recommendations?
Well, maybe you could get some mechanism going like this: make a
Samba share called "cdmaster" or something like that, that the
end-user's that need to make a CD put all their files in (and make
sure they know that it gets purged daily or something, so they don't
rely on leaving files there!). Then, maybe you can create a setuid
script or something that runs mkisofs and cdrecord against that
directory. That way, your users only need to know to telnet in and
type a command like "makecd", after going to the server and sticking a
CD-R/RW disc in of course.
Lazor> The server is definitely the best place for the tape backup
Lazor> unit but am I going to end up having to do things manually every
Lazor> time someone wants files restored? It would be great if there
Lazor> was a solution where they had a backup utility on their workstations
Lazor> that would interface with the backup server. Does something like
Lazor> this exist? Any recommendations on this would also be welcomed.
Well, with the backup mechanism I use, I'm the one that ends up
restoring files. I've thought of doing the following though - making
the directory with the backup logs a read-only share, and letting them
figure out which tape to restore from. Then giving them a shell
script to do the restore.
Arkeia (sp?) make a shareware (try for 30 days) backup package that
has a Linux server and a Windows client. Used to come on the Redhat
solutions CD, at least with 5.2 it did...
Best regards,
Jim
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