[Box Backup] ML Archive / blocking sync

[Volker Wegert]

Hello all,

http://boxbackup.org/trac/wiki/MailingLists points to
http://lists.warhead.org.uk/pipermail/boxbackup for the mailing list
archives, but that site gives me a 403. So please forgive me if I'm
asking a question that has been answered before...

I've been using Box Backup for quite some time mow to backup a Mac
system to a linux server - initially because it was one of the few
systems that could deal with the HFS+ special attributes. I have never
encountered any issues and like the small administrative overhead so
much that I'd like to move a set of Linux-based laptops to Box Backup,
too. For these laptops, I've setup a kind of "maintenance mode" - a
special runlevel that causes a set of actions to be run that you usually
don't want to kick in when you're out in the field and running on
battery power - things like texpire, updatedb, emerge --sync and so
on. This maintenance mode also includes the current backup (more a less
a variant of the hardlink-rsync-cow theme). Now it wouldn't be a
problem to replace the rsync command with a bbackupctl sync, but I need
the script to _wait_ until the backup is completed because the laptop is
shut down and powered off afterwards automatically (no use to keep it
running all night). Is there a way to either let "bbackupctl sync" block
until the backup is completed or query whether a backup is currently
running?

And one more issue - I've scripted a small nagios check plug-in that
checks the current rsync target and reminds the users to put their
laptops into maintenance mode if they haven't done so for a certain
period. To convert this, I'd need some way to find out when the last
sync for a certain client was performed on the server side. Is there
another way to do this than parsing the server log file?

Thanks in advance
  Volker

-- 
* Volker Wegert * http://www.volker-wegert.de/contact *
"What will you do now?" said Susan. - "Lie", said Lu-Tze happily, "It's
amazing how often that works." (Terry Pratchett, Thief Of Time)