Amanda at Fermilab
Abstract
The Amanda backup system is being proposed as the replacement to our
existing fmbsuite of scripts at Fermilab.
This document will provide an overview of setting up and using
Amanda using our pre-compiled binaries provided as a
ups package, in particular setting up
backup servers, and backup client nodes, and performing basic
actions like running backups, restoring files, etc.
Software installation
The Amanda package can be installed as a ups package simply by doing a
upd install amanda -G -c
and then doing a
ups installasroot amanda
on each system as root. This will copy the amanda binaries to
/usr/amanda on the local system disk, add the needed entries
to /etc/inetd.conf, and restart inetd.
Client configuration
On each client system, you will need to create a ~daemon/.amandahosts
file, one line, containing your backup server name, and "daemon" --
the user-id who will be running any backups. Note that this is the
same format as your usual .rhosts file.
Server configuration
On your server, you will want to create a ~daemon/.amandahosts file
(.rhosts file format) listing each client system and user you want
to be able to do a restore (usually only root on that system).
Next you need to setup an amanda.conf file, and a disklist
file. This is described in detail in the
chapter
on Amanda in the O'Reilly
Unix Backup and Recovery
book, but for most local configurations you can simply take
the /usr/amanda/etc/amanda/example/amanda.conf, set your tape
device and type, and use the ammkdisklist script in the Amanda ups
product (assuming you can rsh to all of the clients in your cluster)
to make the initial disklists file, by issuing the command:
ammkdisklist client1 client2 ... > disklist
to build an initial disklist.