NEW LINKS STUFF

Have spent quite a bit of time revising links on this blog today. Was getting rather sick of not having the links I need available on each machine I have been working on. So this blog has become a bit of a "Link Central" for all those popular links that I need and can't get to when I'm somewhere else. Now I have access anywhere anytime. Sounds like an Ad for an "e" service!

BACKUP STUFF - UPDATE BLOG

Its a long time since I updated this blog. So, as you the past few entries about setting up a backup regime from earlier this month have now been entered from notes I have not previously published and kept inhouse.
That, as well as a bit of revision of what the hell I was doing technically, pretty much sums up what I have been doing today!

BACKUP STUFF - TEST LEARN BASH

Found some good tutorials on bash scripting and am using them to develop a simple backup scripting regime. Checkout Writing Shell Scripts and Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO for some cool ways to use scripts. The latter link has a few very simple back up scripts that I am thinking about utilising as testing the 3rd Party script is taking as much time as employing the KISS principle and making our own simpler one.

TAR, GZIP, BZIP TEST LEARN STUFF #1

Gaining understanding of tar via the command line. Restored single files from an archive. For example:
tar -xpf tar_test.tar \tar_test/ip_sorted.txt > test.txt
Will need this knowledge to restore specific files from a tar ball. Noted that it is better not to compress backup tar archives with the z option

BACKUP STUFF - TEST LEARN TAR

It was found that the tarballs made from the 3rd Party script were being created. The problem was that all files in the the archive could not be fully extracted. Further understanding of the tar command was needed in order to see if files could be extracted safely and without risk from back-up archives. Testing outside of the 3rd party script needed to be performed to analyze why things were failing. Further Knowledge needed to be attained to reach a good understanding of the tar program. Knowledge needs to encompass tar create, extract and incremental commands to ensure that a backup regime was correctly enabled. Gaining a good understanding of tar commands may lead to either ditching the 3rd Party Script or creating a script that will work to our requirements.
In any case the employment of 3rd Party or home-made backup script will require knowledge in the following (This knowledge will be necessary in future systems administration and application development circumstances anyway so nothing is wasted by learning how to use these applications/commands/scripts anyway):
- Basic Bash Scripting - for setting up our own scripts to back-up data
- Tar, Gzip, Bzip and Incremental backup settings
- File ownerships settings and requirements
Outside of this there is still the issue of post server reboot auto LVM volume remounting to be solved so that all and sundry can get to files in the file storage folders.

BACKUP STUFF - USE 3RD PARTY SCRIPT #2

Found that the backup script had incorrect permissions and the /backup/last-full/ file needed reseting will see what happens on 20051207 duplicated the board directory in the ops and functions folder to check wether it tars directories with spaces in names. Continuing to test tar by hand

BACKUP STUFF - USE 3RD PARTY SCRIPT

A test scenario backup system has been set up on the new linux fileserver to confirm and configure a backup script that was found at "Securing and Optimizing Linux: RedHat Edition -A Hands on Guide Chapter 33. Why's and When's of Backup and Restore" on the net. This script suited our backup needs - see the webpage for details.