Filipe Brandenburger wrote: > This is not directly related to your guide, but to BackupPC and the > CentOS package for it... Sorry for taking this a little off your > original topic. That's ok. You're entitled to your opinion, however, I'm sure others will find my guide useful and helpful to heighten their experience with BackupPC. > 1) It doesn't work on a 64-bit machine, since the Perl modules will be > installed under /usr/lib64 but they will require '/usr/lib' instead. My backup server isn't 64 bit, so I can't really say much here. > 2) It requires mod_perl, which in turn requires you to run Apache as > user backuppc, which is not something I would do on a machine where > Apache is already being used for something else. Use it as a CGI is > not trivial from there, and requires changing permissions to files > deployed on the RPM (in other words, would be lost in an upgrade). This is why you dedicate one server and one instance of Apache to being nothing but a backup server. I mention this is my guide, as does the README for the CentOS installation. They at least tell you that up front, so it should not be a surprise. Personally, I don't want a backup server doing anything else but backups. > First I tried to work around these issues, but after a while I ended > up getting the SRPM from Fedora 10 and rebuilding it in my machine and > installing that one, and I have to say that it's much simpler than the > one provided by CentOS. It works out of the box on a 64-bit machine, > the administration interface is installed by default as a CGI > (although I believe someone experienced enough would easily be able to > use that same one with mod_perl just by changing Apache's config) and > it actually includes a /etc/httpd/conf.d/backuppc file that works out > of the box. I found it to be pretty simple. Considering I just switched all my backups from rsnapshot over to BackupPC this week, and this was the first week I've ever used BackupPC in my life, I don't think it was that difficult to implement. But, I'm running x86 not x86_64, thus my experience was better. > The only issue I had with the Fedora RPM is that changing TopDir on > the config file does not work, but that is an issue upstream and I'm > almost sure CentOS one will not work either. I opened this bug for > that, but it's still not fixed: > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=473944 Changing the TopDir worked fine for me, it just complained that cpool and pc didn't exist if you change the path. Create the directories and make backuppc the owner and it works fine. I'm pointing my backups to an encrypted /srv/backuppc directory and things are working fine. > Anyway, I'm very thankful for CentOS and I don't mean this e-mail as > bashing the work of the packagers, this were only my impressions when > I tried to implement this specific software, and I'm only stating my > opinion here. In other words, I'm not saying that the Fedora package > is better, I'm just saying it worked better for me, with less need to > tweak, with a simpler setup. So far, my experience has been good enough to write a guide for it. I've found some 64 bit applications to be a pain, so don't let that ruin your opinion. Regards, Max
