[CentOS] Samba or NFS

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 10:52 AM, Jerry McAllister <jerrymc at msu.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 07:54:17AM -0500, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 8:14 PM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
>> > On 02/11/11 5:12 PM, Robert Heller wrote:
>> >>
>> >> OTOH, for mere backup using rsync and ssh might work even better and be
>> >> somewhat simplier.
>> >
>> > except that provides no point in time restoration ability.
>> >
>> > I prefer backup schemes that use dump/restore to do occasional full and
>> > regular incremental backups, and for these, NFS is quite useful.
>>
>> rsnapshot is a perl script wrapper for rsync. Works *beautifully* to
>> provide hardlinked temporal snapshot repositories, I've used it
>> effectively for years.
>>
>> dump/restore is also deprecated because it's reading the raw
>> fileystem, and modern Linux (such as CentOS 5.x) does a lot of paging.
>> So data that is still paged out yet, and not yet written to disk, is
>> not backed up correctly and likely to be corrupt. Definitely switch to
>> tar, or star if you need SELinux permissions backed up, to write to
>> disk or for temporal snapshots of your OS.
>
> dump/restore deprecated???  Sounds like your own personal pronouncement.
> dump/restore is very actively used.

So are rsh and telnet. This does not prevent their well justified
deprecation. Even Linus Torvalds and RedHat  have deprecated
dump/restore, and the advent of ext3 with journaling and ext4 with the
write-to-disk operations delayed up to a minute make the risks even
greater. There's a decent synopsis of the problem at:

    http://dump.sourceforge.net/isdumpdeprecated.html

>> Rsync, unfortunately, has issues with SELinux restoration in my experience.
>
> SELinux has lots of issues with lots of things making its value suspect.
>
> ////jerry

Well, yes, it's an ongoing issue. "star" works well to propagate those
settings, and is useful for storing backups with the corect SELinux
information for restoration. rsync, tar, and dump/restore do *NOT*, at
least on CentOS 5.x