[OpenAFS] backup software (TSM/Veritas/TiBS, what else?)

[Rainer Toebbicke]

Tracy Di Marco White wrote:
> I manage Iowa State University's afs cell, and for the last decade plus
> we've been using one tape drive per file server, and the afs backup and
> butc commands (with local scripts) to do backups.  We're looking at
> getting a tape library and software of some sort to do backups, so I'm
> trying to find out what works reasonably well with AFS.
> 
> What can people tell me about these choices, what other choices do
> people have experience with?
> 
> TSM was supported by AFS (rather than TSM supports AFS) in the last
> official release, am I correct in assuming that support is still in
> OpenAFS?  Is it limited to specific versions of TSM, or would I be
> likely to find problems using the latest versions of TSM?  My file
> servers are a mix of Digital Unix 4.0D & 4.0F, Solaris 2.7 & 8.  One
> URL I found suggested that the tape coordinator (buta?) had to run
> on Solaris 2.6, 2.7 or AIX 4.2 or higher.  Have these requirements
> changed to include later versions of Solaris, or any other operating
> systems?

When I last tried the OpenAFS butc compiled with TSM support on a TSM 5 
installation it did not work out of the box because of some parameters not 
being known to TSM any longer. The problem was solvable by modifying that part 
in the butc_xbsa.c file passing it the correct parmameters. After that it 
worked fine (Solaris 2.8).

Currently we're backing up part of our AFS cell with an IBM-supplied butc 
running on the ADSM (Sorry: TSM) servers under AIX 4.3.

Recently we started backing up into our own HSM system (CASTOR) by writing a 
minimal xbsa interface for it which was really straightforward. The Linux butc 
needs a little massaging in order to link with xbsa (e.g. by simply copying 
the code for Solaris).

I heard of other backup systems supporting 'xbsa' (e.g. hicomp from mount10) 
which I suspect would work as well once you manage to pass in the right 
parameters.




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Rainer Toebbicke        http://cern.ch/~rtb         rtb@mail.cern.ch  O__
European Laboratory for Particle Physics(CERN) - Geneva, Switzerland   > |
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