[CentOS-docs] Added BackupPC Guide

Thu Dec 18 17:13:03 UTC 2008
Filipe Brandenburger <filbranden at gmail.com>

Hi,

This is not directly related to your guide, but to BackupPC and the
CentOS package for it... Sorry for taking this a little off your
original topic.

I tried it sometime ago, but I had several issues with it.

1) It doesn't work on a 64-bit machine, since the Perl modules will be
installed under /usr/lib64 but they will require '/usr/lib' instead.
2) It requires mod_perl, which in turn requires you to run Apache as
user backuppc, which is not something I would do on a machine where
Apache is already being used for something else. Use it as a CGI is
not trivial from there, and requires changing permissions to files
deployed on the RPM (in other words, would be lost in an upgrade).

First I tried to work around these issues, but after a while I ended
up getting the SRPM from Fedora 10 and rebuilding it in my machine and
installing that one, and I have to say that it's much simpler than the
one provided by CentOS. It works out of the box on a 64-bit machine,
the administration interface is installed by default as a CGI
(although I believe someone experienced enough would easily be able to
use that same one with mod_perl just by changing Apache's config) and
it actually includes a /etc/httpd/conf.d/backuppc file that works out
of the box.

The only issue I had with the Fedora RPM is that changing TopDir on
the config file does not work, but that is an issue upstream and I'm
almost sure CentOS one will not work either. I opened this bug for
that, but it's still not fixed:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=473944

Anyway, I'm very thankful for CentOS and I don't mean this e-mail as
bashing the work of the packagers, this were only my impressions when
I tried to implement this specific software, and I'm only stating my
opinion here. In other words, I'm not saying that the Fedora package
is better, I'm just saying it worked better for me, with less need to
tweak, with a simpler setup.

Thanks,
Filipe