Backup Central

Does Amanda/GNUTAR _follow_ all mount points and symbolic links in a
DLE?

Everytime that I setup Amanda clients, I get confused on these issues.

If this is covered in the FAQ-O-Matic, then I do not see it. If it has
been covered on the mailing list countless times, then my searches are
too lame. Hopefully, this post, including this subject line, will make
this easier to find for those who come after ;>

If I am right, by default, Amanda/GNUTAR _does_ follow follow mount
points contained within a DLE, but does _not_ follow symbolic links.

This makes a difference regarding deploying exclude files.

What do you think?

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On Mon, Jul 12, 2004 at 03:13:24PM -0500, Michael D Schleif wrote:
Does Amanda/GNUTAR _follow_ all mount points and symbolic links in a
DLE?

Everytime that I setup Amanda clients, I get confused on these issues.

If this is covered in the FAQ-O-Matic, then I do not see it. If it has
been covered on the mailing list countless times, then my searches are
too lame. Hopefully, this post, including this subject line, will make
this easier to find for those who come after ;>

If I am right, by default, Amanda/GNUTAR _does_ follow follow mount
points contained within a DLE, but does _not_ follow symbolic links.

This makes a difference regarding deploying exclude files.

What do you think?

Amanda merely starts the backup program, in this case gnutar.
Thus the gnutar manpage/reference doc is your best source for
information. A guess here, gnutar does not cross mountpoints
unless an option is used (of course the opposite may be true,
i.e., will cross mountpoints unless an option is used).

Whichever, the gnutar options used are recorded in the debug
log files in (by default) /tmp/amanda.


--
Jon H. LaBadie jon < at > jgcomp.com
JG Computing
4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159
Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)

Michael D Schleif wrote:

Does Amanda/GNUTAR _follow_ all mount points and symbolic links in a
DLE?

Everytime that I setup Amanda clients, I get confused on these issues.

If this is covered in the FAQ-O-Matic, then I do not see it. If it has
been covered on the mailing list countless times, then my searches are
too lame. Hopefully, this post, including this subject line, will make
this easier to find for those who come after ;>

If I am right, by default, Amanda/GNUTAR _does_ follow follow mount
points contained within a DLE, but does _not_ follow symbolic links.

Yes. gnutar is invoked as:

gnutar ... --directory /the/DLE/entry ...

By changing the working directory to /the/DLE/entry the symlink
"/the/DLE/entry", if it is one, is effectively resolved.
Inside that toplevel directory, symlinks are never followed, just like
you would expect from a decent backup program.

Setting up a group of symlinks used to be a trick to shorten long
pathnames when you have trouble with the size of a UDP dgram (for
exchanging the estimates).




This makes a difference regarding deploying exclude files.

What do you think?



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Paul Bijnens, Xplanation Tel +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM Fax +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/ email: Paul.Bijnens < at > xplanation.com
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