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

[Adrian]

Ben,

Why not make bbackupd call home once every 24 hours?  The actual time
could be a config file option.  If you specify 0, it turns this feature
off.

Actually, I already do this. I have cron touch a dummy file every day. 
That way bbackupd is forced to call home.  (Since my clients are all used
daily, I am not actually sure if this is working, but I set it up the last
time that this question came up, and I have not had a miss except where
there was an actual problem.)

I also have "logwatch" set up to report the number of calls made by each
client everyday.  This has caught a lot of otherwise invisible problems
(like the time my server's hard drive began to fail).

Adrian

>
> 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
>
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