How to backup to disk using flexbackup on e-smith

By: Des Dougan (ddougan@telus.net)

Release: 0.1, 13 September 2001


Acknowledgements
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Customizing flexbackup within the e-smith template system was suggested
to me by Darrell May, after I'd gone down a separate route. Darrell's 
solution, contained herein, is more elegant and e-smith-compliant.


Summary
_______________________________________________________________________
This document explains how to use flexbackup and the e-smith manager to 
run a scheduled backup to a disk drive on a client workstation. 

It has been tested with version 4.1.2 and should work with versions 
4.1.1 and 4.1.


Introduction
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I run e-smith on my small home LAN. Currently, I'm without a tape drive
but wanted to backup my server to a spare disk on my desktop PC. This
How-To does this using existing e-smith features, in part customized 
via the template system.


Creating a filesystem share on the desktop (Windows) PC
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In Explorer, create the directory you want to backup to. Select it, right 
click and select the "Sharing" option. Create a share name of "Backup".
Make sure it is writable by all (this is dependent on your Windows OS. In
Win2K, this is done from the "Permissions" dialog on the "Sharing" tab). 
The default settings should be OK here.


Setting up the mount and fstab 
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The Linux convention is to mount removable media from /mnt. Create a 
directory called /mnt/backup to act as mount point for the share 
created previously.

Using your favourite editor, add an entry to /etc/fstab for the share:

//servername/sharename  /mnt/backup  smbfs   username=name,password=pword

where "servername" and "sharename" are the name of the PC and the share
you created previously. /mnt/backup identifies the mount point, while 
the username and password pair are the userid and password used to logon 
to the PC (required for NT and Win2K systems). smbfs denotes the mount as 
using the smb file system. 


Configuring the flexbackup templates
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The standard e-smith backup routines, configured via the manager, are
run from /sbin/e-smith/backup. As is the e-smith way, this script is 
built from template fragments held in the directory
/etc/e-smith/templates/sbin/e-smith/backup. The following steps must be
followed to customize it for our purposes:

1. Having logged into the server as root, type the following commands.
   mkdir -p /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/sbin/e-smith/backup
   cd /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/sbin/e-smith/backup
   cp /etc/e-smith/templates/sbin/e-smith/backup/* .

2. These steps will have left you with 9 template fragment files in the
   directory you've just created.

3. Using your favourite editor, delete the contents (not the files 
   themselves!) of fragments "20probe-tape" and "90rewind-tape".

4. Optionally, edit the fragment "00check-enabled" and change the two
   instances of "Tape" to "Network".

5. Create a new fragment "25mount-share". This should contain:

   mount /mnt/backup

   which mounts the filesystem share created earlier.

6. Create a second fragment called "95umount-share", containing:

   umount /mnt/backup

   this unmounts the share after the backup has completed.

The template then needs to be expanded to create the new version of the 
backup script:

/sbin/e-smith/expand-template /sbin/e-smith/backup


Configuring flexbackup to write to disk
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Flexbackup can be configured to backup to a disk by simply changing the 
"$device" variable in /etc/flexbackup.conf via the e-smith way by entering:

/sbin/e-smith/db configuration setprop backup Device /mnt/backup 
/sbin/e-smith/signal-event conf-backup


Configuring the e-smith manager and (optionally) cron
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In the Administration section of the manager, select "Backup or restore",
then select the "Configure tape backup" action. Check the "Enable tape 
backup" box and the time for both the backup and reminder selections. 
Hit the "Update Configuration" button. 

That's it! Done, finished, complete; unless, of course, you don't want to 
backup on a daily basis (I run mine weekly).

The cron entry for the backup is located in /etc/cron.d/backup. It has two
entries, one for the reminder and the second for the backup. These can be 
edited to meet your scheduling needs (use "man cron" if you need help here).


Summary
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This procedure provides an e-smith standard way of backing up to disk. 
However, as Darrell May has pointed out, its strength lies in its 
flexibility when restoring, as the power of flexbackup is available to you.

Good luck!