Backup Central

Made some progress since my last post. Details below incase they're
helpful to others. But I am still having problems with Windows clients
not getting some files backed up. The files fail silently (they just
aren't enumerated in the log). I have confirmed that I can see and
retrieve them by hand w/ smbclient, and I am convinced the exclude list
cannot be at fault -- for example, only half of 6 very similarly named
files will get picked up when none of the names remotely resemble
anything I've excluded. Is there a way to get more detailed information
that what shows in the log? Like a transcript of the smb conversation?


Alright, on to what is working:
I solved my Mac OS X client problems by 1) switching to tar 2) rtfm:
don't put trailing /'s on directories you're excluding 3) excluding
/Network and /var/private/automount

On Windows I discovered, much to my surprise, that the random access
denied errors were 100% legit -- there were incorrectly set security
permissions randomly scattered around my disk.


-Lorrin



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Lorrin Nelson writes:

Made some progress since my last post. Details below incase they're
helpful to others. But I am still having problems with Windows clients
not getting some files backed up. The files fail silently (they just
aren't enumerated in the log). I have confirmed that I can see and
retrieve them by hand w/ smbclient, and I am convinced the exclude list
cannot be at fault -- for example, only half of 6 very similarly named
files will get picked up when none of the names remotely resemble
anything I've excluded. Is there a way to get more detailed information
that what shows in the log? Like a transcript of the smb conversation?

This is all internal to smbclient. Just to verify, are you doing
an incremental or full dump? With an incremental the files could
be skipped based on mtime. Or maybe something gets messed up
with the exclude options.

I'd recommend looking at the XferLOG file and manually running
the smbclient command at the top of the file. Pipe the output
into "tar tvf -". Are the files missing in that case too?
smbclient does have a debug level you can set with the -d
option. You could add that to BackupPC or manually when
you run smbclient.

I am surprised that you can access them manually but smbclient's
tar option does not pick them up.

Craig


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Craig, you're right -- my problem was that I was doing incremental
backups. I did a full backup and everything worked as expected. Thanks
for taking the time to help out.

What must have happened is that the mtimes were read when I hadn't yet
fixed my security settings. Then, once that was cleared up and BackupPC
had permission to retrieve the files it didn't. I imagine fixing that
would involve logic to only record mtimes for files that have actually
been backed up, but it's somewhat of a one-time-only situation and not
too important.

-Lorrin


On Mar 11, 2004, at 12:57 AM, Craig Barratt wrote:

Lorrin Nelson writes:

Made some progress since my last post. Details below incase they're
helpful to others. But I am still having problems with Windows clients
not getting some files backed up. The files fail silently (they just
aren't enumerated in the log). I have confirmed that I can see and
retrieve them by hand w/ smbclient, and I am convinced the exclude
list
cannot be at fault -- for example, only half of 6 very similarly named
files will get picked up when none of the names remotely resemble
anything I've excluded. Is there a way to get more detailed
information
that what shows in the log? Like a transcript of the smb conversation?

This is all internal to smbclient. Just to verify, are you doing
an incremental or full dump? With an incremental the files could
be skipped based on mtime. Or maybe something gets messed up
with the exclude options.

I'd recommend looking at the XferLOG file and manually running
the smbclient command at the top of the file. Pipe the output
into "tar tvf -". Are the files missing in that case too?
smbclient does have a debug level you can set with the -d
option. You could add that to BackupPC or manually when
you run smbclient.

I am surprised that you can access them manually but smbclient's
tar option does not pick them up.

Craig


-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IBM Linux Tutorials
Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of
GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system
administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click
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http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/




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Free Linux tutorial presented by Daniel Robbins, President and CEO of
GenToo technologies. Learn everything from fundamentals to system
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Lorrin Nelson writes:

Craig, you're right -- my problem was that I was doing incremental
backups. I did a full backup and everything worked as expected. Thanks
for taking the time to help out.

What must have happened is that the mtimes were read when I hadn't yet
fixed my security settings. Then, once that was cleared up and BackupPC
had permission to retrieve the files it didn't. I imagine fixing that
would involve logic to only record mtimes for files that have actually
been backed up, but it's somewhat of a one-time-only situation and not
too important.

Yes, smb and tar base incrementals solely on mtime. So if you delete
a file, or create a new file with an old mtime (eg: rename or unpack
a zip file), then smb and tar won't pick up those files during an
incremental.

In contrast, rsync checks all the meta data during an incremental
(eg: exist or not, ownership, mtime, mode, size), so it will
pick any new or rename files, deleted files etc.

Craig


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administration.http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1470&alloc_id=3638&op=click
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