[Box Backup] Multiple machines on the same account

[Ben Summers]

On 29 Feb 2004, at 02:11, Pascal Lalonde wrote:

>
> Is it safe to use the same account to store data for multiple machines?
> Must I give different names for backup locations? Can they all use the
> same client certificate (In fact, I think they must) ?
>
> For example, on host A:
> BackupLocations
> {
> 	home-A
> 	{
> 		Path = /home
> 	}
> }
>
> And on host B:
> BackupLocations
> {
> 	home-B
> 	{
> 		Path = /home
> 	}
> }
>
>
> The reason for this is that I have a few friends for whom I will backup
> data. I want to set quotas for each of them, but they may have more 
> than
> one machine to backup. For example, if I set a quota of 5G for Bob, and
> he decides to backup his 3 machines, I don't want him to exceed a total
> of 5G of data, without having to care how much each machine uses.
>
> Am I safe with the above setup?

Well, you're safe, but not efficient. (The answers to the original 
questions are: Yes (but very inefficient), Yes, Yes (they must))

Whenever the client detects that someone else has modified the store, 
it does a full scan of the account, downloading listings for every 
directory. This isn't particularly good, and should be avoided.

It's just not designed for this -- you'll need to create multiple 
accounts and ask bob how the 5Gb should be split up.

>  Can the server handle multiple
> connections on the same account?

Yes, as long as only one is read/write. So the store can be updated 
while you're using bbackupquery.

>
>
> Also I noticed a few minor things which could need
> improvement/corrections:
>
> - In bbackupquery, when you type the help command, the "ls" command 
> does
>   not get shown.
> - The output of a few "help <command>" could be formatted to fit nicely
>   on a 80 characters wide terminal. For example, "help get".
> - "help get" misses a newline on the first line:
>   get <object-filename> [<local-filename>]get -i <object-id> 
> <local-filename>
>                                          ^^
> - Same goes for "help compare".
>
> - In the documentation, maybe add something about servers behind a
>   firewall (which are not directly on the net, via NAT). I had to
>   modify the /etc/box/bbstored.conf file so the ListenAddress points to
>   the IP of the server on the LAN, even if the hostname used by the
>   clients is in fact the hostname of the firewall.
>   I issued the bbstored-config command with the hostname of the
>   firewall (as instructed on the website).
>   I figured it out by looking for exception 3/16 in ServerException.h
>   (BindError), by it might be good to mention it.

I'll get these all sorted -- extremely helpful of you, thanks!

>
> And should we exclude /var/bbackupd from our backups? Is there a point
> to back it up?

Exclude it. Backing it up isn't useful, and it'll be changed after 
every run so it's just going to waste bandwidth.

Of course, /etc/box/bbackupd should be backed up onto traditional media 
multiple times, and this media carefully looked after!

Ben