I didn't see a response to this, which is a bit unusual as the FSR guys are pretty quick to talk to folks on Toasters. As long as I'm here let me take a crack at answering.
FAServer is the original name of filers before we moved to the Fxxx nomenclature. there were 400, 450, 1300, 1400 and perhaps other FAServers that I don't know about. They were this Darth Vader black pedestal sort of things that looked really cool. I just took a look on the web and couldn't find a picture of one, although if you read some of the older tech reports I am sure you'll see them mentioned. When our new facility is fully built we plan on having a little Filer Museum with samples of all the older machines - hopefully they'll also have a web based tour you can take to see where it all started.
1) The original BudTool used an rsh mechanism to get the filer to kick off a dump/restore. By piping the output back to BudTool, Budtool could effectively get a dump stream routed wherever it liked. Budtool put some header info on the stream, but otherwise it was just dump/restore. So the answer to (1) is its regular dump/restore format, which is a Unix derivative. It will restore to a filer or to a Sun machine with UFS restore but on the Sun you lose all the Windows attributes since Sun doesn't know what they are. Initially when folks just had one filer they needed to know they could get at their data if the filer broke, hence the Sun compatibility. Nowadays people aren't nearly as concerned about being stranded.
2) NDMP actually uses dump/restore as the underlying mechanism to handle the data, so its format is the same as dump/restore with a bit of header info. It tracks inodes which are logical pointers but not pointers to physical disk locations, so you can dump from any filer and restore to any other filer to your heart's content.
3) I think I just answered this. FAServer is like doing an "rsh filer.name dump" piped to a tape. NDMP uses a different protocol to invoke dump and direct the stream elsewhere. I think people are pushing you toward NDMP most new development (features/functions) will be done on NDMP as it is an industry standard and it works on other hardware vendors gear too.
Paul Norman, Product Manager Direct: (408) 822-6288 Network Appliance E-Mail: pnorman@netapp.com 495 East Java Drive Corp: (408) 822-6000 Sunnyvale, CA 94089 Web: WWW.NetApp.Com
-----Original Message----- From: Jay Orr [mailto:orrjl@stl.nexen.com] Sent: Thursday, September 23, 1999 9:44 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Backup formats
Hi all!
I remember a spate of conversation about backup formats. Currently we have two F330's now running 5.3.2r1 and have two sun servers running budtool. One is at 4.6, the other is 4.6.1.
I found out as of 4.6.1 that they are no longer supporting the "dump.FAServer" dump. I have never been able to find documentation on what exactly this is (nor could the tech I spoke with at legato), but that is how the filers have been backed up.
Now, if someone could be kind enough to answer a few confused questions :
- is the FAServer dump like a tar snapshot? One selling
point on other backup software I've been pitched is that NDMP can only be restored to the toaster, it's a non-standard format and can't be restored to a host then a toaster.
- Does NDMP save info of where on the hard disk it is? I
thought I read that somewhere, which means you can't backup one filer then restore it on another...
- Can someone give me a comparison of the different methods
of backing up a toaster? I.e. what is FASserver and NDMP?
Thanks!
Fujitsu - Nexion, St. Louis, MO Jay Orr (314) 579-6517