[Box Backup] interactive bbackupquery

[Ben Summers]

On 5 Feb 2004, at 09:16, Juan Vera wrote:

>
> I finally instaled Box Backup on a couple of boxes.
> Builing was fine and installation of clients was easy.
> Parcels were nice on machines w/o compiler and
> bbackupd-config was pretty simple.

I'm glad you found it OK...

>  On one machine
> I ran it with args server-hostname working-dir in
> the inverse order, I didn't notice it until
> the signed cert&rootCA were installed on the client,
> and nameserver logs showed queries for a path.mydomain
> :)

I'll modify the script to validate these.

>
> Exceptions are ugly, yes; but luckily enabling extended
> logging was enougth to solve the problems I had.
>
> As a cosmetic note, note upper vs lower 'e':
>
> Feb  5 04:42:44 furia bbackupd[4492]: Exception caught (3/47), reset 
> state and waiting to retry...
> Feb  5 04:47:06 furia bbackupd[28683]: exception Server (3/25) -- 
> terminating
>
> What I didn't like was the unfriendly interactive
> bbackupquery:

I am going to do a lot of work to improve this, and give better 
alternatives to using bbackupquery, which really is a sysadmin tool.


>
> # /usr/local/bin/bbackupquery
> Box Backup Query Tool v0.03, (c) Ben Summers 2003, 2004
> * Commercial service provision using this software prohibited, see 
> license.
> Using configuration file /etc/box/bbackupd.conf
> Connecting to store...
> Handshake with store...
> Login to store...
> Login complete.
> query > ?
> Unrecognised command: ?
> query > ls
> Unrecognised command: ls
> query > help
> Unrecognised command: help
> query > quit
> Logging off...
> Session finished.
> #
>
> got me back to web page :( there I saw that the
> command is 'list'. Would you add 'ls' as an
> alias for 'list'?

Yes. It annoys me too!


>  Anyway, readline is nice, and
> restoring files was really simple.
>
> New questions: Why It is not recommended that
> you backup the {etc,root} directory of your disc?

I want to avoid backing up the keys -- just to be very careful about 
things.

And the root directory is likely to contain many mounted filesystems, 
and having a mount point within a backup location is a Bad Thing 
because it ruins file and directory tracking (to handle renames 
efficiently).

>
> Is it a technical restriction or just a warning
> until the beta stage is done?

/etc I will sort by putting in an exclude for the keys files, and the 
filesystems thing, bbackupd will refuse to run if you break this 
restriction.

>
> How can I force bbackupd to upload changes whenever
> I want? Tried with kill -1 but it ignored some
> files, I think because of the BackupInterval and/or
> MaxUploadWait.

Yes, I'm afraid you can't do this at the moment, but I'm planning to 
change things so that you can issue a command, and it will bring 
everything absolutely up to date.

>
> Are you considering to implement server to client
> connections?

Yes.

>  In case you are -and I hope you do-
> maybe it would be even better to be able to handle both
> ways in the same server simultaneaously: some machines
> connecting to the server and the server connecting to
> some other. While I don't have that need, I think it
> gives some more flexibility to the software.

If you're going to do something, you might as well do it properly. So 
yes, it'll do both -- it's really not that much more work.

I can't promise when it'll be done, of course.

>
> Resuming: I like Box Backup more now that I tried it
> than while it was just docs influence. I think it will
> be a new parter :)

I'm glad it's working out for you so far, I look forward to the longer 
term results!

Thanks,

Ben