[Box Backup] Checking that bbackupd's are backing up?

[Ben Summers]

On 15 Sep 2004, at 07:46, Per Thomsen wrote:

> I would like to build in some centralized tracking of all my clients, 
> to make sure that they are running, and backing things up. This would 
> allow me to hunt down any clients that were shut down, or failed to 
> restart after a reboot...
>
> Rather than distributing software to all clients, I would like to be 
> able to do this on the bbstored server. I've been thinking along the 
> lines of log-parsing, but then I looked at the output of 
> 'bbstoreaccounts info'. The first 10 digits of the 'Client Store 
> Marker' looks remarkably like a time(2) return value. Would it be safe 
> to assume that the time stamp denotes the last time a file was 
> uploaded from the client?

Unfortunately, no.

This is quite apart from the fact that if bbackupd doesn't see anything 
to upload, it won't even contact the server.

>
> If so, this would be a good (IMO) way to check that a client has 
> backed *something* up in the last x seconds, and warning me if not.

You're not the first who has asked about this feature!

>
> If people have other (and better) ways of doing this, I'd love to hear 
> about them.

This software grew out of a system I was building. Each client would be 
running the backup software, as well as a generic error management 
daemon. This would report back errors to a central system for 
resolution. The servers were designed to just sit there and do their 
stuff, and be fairly passive about things since most of the difficult 
bits would be done by a generic system.

This is not how it's actually being used in practice -- everyone wants 
it to be nice and self-contained, which is a perfectly reasonable thing 
to want.

So I think that the server side management should be overhauled in the 
next version. Issues I can think of are

* Use names instead of account numbers
* Monitoring of client activity and error status
* Additional reporting of space used on the server
* Perhaps an overhaul of the account database, which was always a bit 
of a temporary measure until I got it reading the information from a 
proper database.
* Feeding the status into another system, perhaps piping status into a 
script?

I think the certificates are OK, unless anyone disagrees.

I would like to get it right first time. Perhaps I could ask someone to 
start a specification document, which we can all revise until we're 
happy with it? I'd like it to be fairly detailed, specifying exactly 
how the user will interact with the system, and then I'll get it 
implemented in 0.09.

Ben