[CentOS] Dump on remote filesystems?

Tue Jan 29 13:47:55 UTC 2008
Luke Dudney <listmail at lukedudney.com>

On 29/01/2008 13:35, Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Tom Brown wrote:
>
>>
>>> I have a couple C5 systems I want to back up.  My plan is to, one 
>>> way or another, back them up to a C5 machine in my office.  I have 
>>> samba installed on the systems to back up, the machines are mounted 
>>> on the system in my office, and a tape library hanging of the system 
>>> in my office.
>>>
>>> I was hoping to perform a simple /sbin/dump of the remote systems.  
>>> I put together a script for another successful backup I have going 
>>> on a system with local filesystems.  But for remote filesystems, I 
>>> get errors of File Cannot Be Accessed (//remote_system/subdir) which 
>>> does exist as an smb mounted filesystem.
>>>
>>> I'd use NFS, but I would like a bit more control and some level of 
>>> encryption for the user authentication and data being transferred.
>>>
>>> If a direct dump of remote smb filesystems isn't possible, I may opt 
>>> to have each system perform their own local dumps, then run a script 
>>> locally on the tape-connected machine to dump those local dumps, or 
>>> copy the dumps locally then dump them to tape.
>>>
>>> If nothing else works, I can always install Windows XP and use 
>>> Windows backup program, but I'd really like to try and get this 
>>> going under Linux before going that route.
>>
>> use amanda, www.amanda.org
>>
>> it rocks
>
> My fundamental question is why dump claims it cannot access what I 
> want it to back up.   What's to say other solutions - Amanda, etc, 
> will work any better?   I want to know how to resolve the source 
> problem before looking into other products.   How will BackupPC or 
> Amanda do any better?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Scott
>

I've never used dump before but reading the manpage seems to indicate 
that it's a tool for backing up an ext2/3 filesystem, not a CIFS 
filesystem which is essentialy how a Samba mount is seen by the kernel 
on your office machine. If I am correct here then I doubt it would work 
over NFS either.

I can put my vote in for amanda as a good alternative.

cheers
Luke