In article 199801131829.MAA18731@vortex.more.net, David Drum david@more.net wrote:
I was wondering if anyone uses amanda to backup their NetApp(s)?
Yup, we do. At least, we used to, until yesterday :) The load on the netapp during phase I of the dump is prohibitively high, and consequently makes our webserver very slow... we're currently rethinking things.
There are a few problems to backing up a toaster via amanda, and here are the solutions, roughly:
- the toaster doesn't run amandad :) And you can't easily make it do so. Our solution is to have amanda backup /dev/netapp1/path on another machine.
To keep the network happy, that "other machine" is also the one that the tape is connected to, and the one that amanda (the master program, or the client, whatever you want to call it) runs on.
"dump" on this machine is actually a script that intercepts requests to dump devices of the form /dev/netapp*. If it isn't, it calls the regular dump. If it is, it calls a separate program, which translates some options, and then starts dump on the toaster, via rsh. (Note that the devices that amanda thinks it's backing up need to exist. Just create them and make them symlinks or hardlinks to /dev/null or /dev/zero. Doesn't really matter).
Next problem: - amanda does not grok toaster "dump" output.
Perl to the rescue again (the dump wrapper is perl, too :).
Since we had to start a separate script anyway, we're piping STDERR through the script, and have it do on-the-fly translations so the output of "dump" as produced by the toaster is massaged into something that amanda understands.
Additionally, we trap "dump W" and read the /etc/dumpdates file on the toaster too, and generate extra output for it.
A few considerations you have to make: - amanda starts by getting estimates for all filesystems it backs up, that is, it makes at least 2 dumps for each filesystem, and terminates the dump once the "estimated" line is in. If the "dump" command on the toaster creates its own snapshot each time you do this, you waste a lot of CPU. We settled on generating a snapshot once each day, and running all backups from that. You have to take extra special care though not to refresh the snapshot while a backup is still running. - amanda doesn't know anything about "oh don't try to backup this so often". At least I can't configure it to do so (without extreme hacks). It knows about priorities, but it will always at least try to make a backup, and if it fits on tape, it will. This generally means that amanda does make a backup of all data on the toaster, at least incrementally. Not strictly necessary with the RAID and all that.
If there is interest, I can post the sources we use to the list, or make them available on the web. Note that the sources are very alpha, and most definately not directly usable on other sites, some tweaking will be necessary.
Best regards,
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