[Box Backup] Feedback and issues with boxbackup-0.10 on OpenSolaris/ZFS

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Luca,

First of all, sorry for the delay in replying. Our mailing list server ate 
a bunch of emails and only just decided to spit them out again.

On Tue, 2 Oct 2007, Lesinigo Luca wrote:

> 1) I more or less followed
> http://bbdev.fluffy.co.uk/trac/wiki/CompilingOnSolaris and it compiled well,
> but "make install-backup-server" did not work. You can read the exact commands
> I used at http://www.semlug.net/moin/OpenSolaris/BoxBackup - sorry for the
> Italian comments, but the commands should be pretty clear. "make
> install-backup-server" gives me [1], repeated once for every binary in the
> server parcel.

I'm not sure why it didn't create /opt/boxbackup/bin, the install program 
should do that. If you need to install again and find the same problem, 
perhaps you could create that directory manually and try again?

I think the other error messages are due to problems with your system, 
e.g. cyclic symbolic links and links that point nowhere, and your install 
program is just pointing these out. Needless and irrelevant perhaps, but I 
don't think it's a bug in Box Backup itself.

> 2) I manually installed boxbackup server on the system (as you can read 
>    on the semlug.net wiki) and it seems to be working without problems 
>    on my SXCE install. It's happily running inside a solaris container 
>    living on a ZFS filesystem, hope this feedback sounds good to you as 
>    it does to me :)
> 
> 2b) zfs with compression=on (uses lzjb, a really light algorithm, much 
> faster than gzip) reports a 1.07 compression factor on a 50GB boxbackup 
> store. Maybe this means you can squeeze something more off the bbackup 
> compression?

Yes, it's definitely possible to get more compression, but you would 
almost certainly sacrifice the ability to do differential (patch) uploads 
which is a bandwidth-saving feature. Having said that, I'm surprised that 
the files can be compressed at all after encryption.

It would be interesting to know which files compressed more than others, 
and why. Perhaps you could gzip some of them as a test and report the 
compression ratios of any that seem particularly compressible?

> 3) I kept getting errors like "while housekeeping account 00040001, exception
> Common OSFileError (Error accessing a file. Check permissions.) (1/9) --
> aborting" [from bbstored] and "Exception: RaidFile RaidFileDoesntExist (2/11)"
> [from bbstoreaccounts info], when the real problem was that I put the 'account
> directories' directly under the raidfile directory (like $dir/$accountsdir),
> while bbstored expected $dir/backup/$accountsdir.
> Mine was just a stupid error transferring the data from a server to another,
> but the error messages weren't useful at all, they were misleading!

Yes, I know that the old error messages did not offer a lot of useful 
information. A lot more verbose and useful error handling has been added 
to more recent versions. You might like to try out the latest version in 
Subversion to see if it helps.

> 4) This is more of a feature request, but having a solaris smf(5) 
>    manifest for boxbackup would be great. I tried to look into it but it 
>    proved to be a more challenging task than what I expected, having 
>    never wrote a manifest. I must say I'm more or less a beginner with 
>    solaris.

It's now been done, see contrib/solaris in trunk.

> Meanwhile, thanks for boxbackup and keep up with the good work! :)

Thank you!

Cheers, Chris.
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