Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 19:44:01 GMT Server: Apache-SSL/0.4.3b Content-type: text/html Content-length: 11717 Last-modified: Wed, 13 Nov 1996 01:47:11 GMT Amanda, The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver

Amanda


The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver
Copyright (c) 1991, 1995 University of Maryland at College Park
All Rights Reserved.

See the file COPYRIGHT for distribution conditions and official warranty disclaimer. Amanda was written by James da Silva.

Amanda 2.3.0 ALPHA RELEASE NOTES - May 19, 1996

The latest version of Amanda is always available via anonymous ftp from ftp.cs.umd.edu:/pub/amanda.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE ``AS-IS''. UMD is making this work available so that other people can use it. This software is in production use at our home site - the UMCP Department of Computer Science - but we make no warranties that it will work for you. Amanda development is unfunded - the author maintains the code in his spare time. As a result, there is no support available other than users helping each other on the amanda-users mailing list. See below for information on the mailing lists.

WHAT'S NEW SINCE 2.2.6?

More details for these new features can be found in docs/WHATS.NEW.

WHAT'S LEFT TO DO FOR AMANDA 2.3?

WHAT'S NEW SINCE 2.2.5?

WHAT'S NEW SINCE 2.1?

Many things have changed since Amanda 2.1. Here are the major items: More details are available in docs/WHATS.NEW.

WHAT IS AMANDA?

This is an alpha-test release of Amanda, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive. This release is currently in daily use at the University of Maryland at College Park Computer Science Department, backing up all the disks on all the workstations in the department: currently over 70 gigabytes of data across more than 400 filesystems on more than 146 workstations and servers, using a single 5 Gigabyte Exabyte EXB-8500. Here are some features of Amanda:

WHAT ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR AMANDA?

Amanda requires a host that is mostly idle at night, with a large capacity tape drive (e.g. an EXABYTE or DAT tape). This becomes the "tape server host". All the computers you are going to dump are the "backup client hosts". The server host can also be a client host. Amanda works best with one or more large "holding disk" partition on the server host available to it for buffering dumps before writing to tape. The holding disk allows Amanda to run backups in parallel to the disk, only writing them to tape when the backup is finished. Note that the holding disk is not required: without it Amanda will run backups sequentially to the tape drive. Running it this way kills the great performance, but still allows you to take advantage of Amanda's other features. As a rule of thumb, for best performance the holding disk should be larger than the dump output from your largest disk partitions. For example, if you are backing up some full gigabyte disks that compress down to 500 MB, then you'll want 500 MB on your holding disk. On the other hand, if those gigabyte drives are partitioned into 500 MB filesystems, they'll probably compress down to 250 MB and you'll only need that much on your holding disk. Amanda will perform better with larger holding disks. We use 800 MB for our holding disk. Actually, Amanda will still work if you have full dumps that are larger than the holding disk: Amanda will send those dumps directly to tape one at a time. If you have many such dumps you will be limited by the dump speed of those machines.

WHAT SYSTEMS DOES AMANDA RUN ON?

Amanda should run on any modern Unix system that supports dump, has sockets and inetd, and either system V shared memory, or BSD mmap implemented. In particular, Amanda 2.3.0 has been compiled, and the client side tested on the following systems: SunOS 4.1.3 IRIX 5.2 SunOS 5.5 BSDI BSD/OS 2.1 Ultrix 4.2 NetBSD 1.0 DEC OSF/1 3.2 AIX 3.2 We only run the server side under SunOS 4.1.3, but it compiles on all those platforms, and I have no reason at this time to beleive it will not work. In addition, I have tracked patches for the following systems that we don't run in house: FreeBSD Linux HP/UX NextStep

HOW DO I GET AMANDA UP AND RUNNING?

docs/INSTALL contains general installation instructions. docs/SYSTEM.NOTES contains system-specific information. docs/KERBEROS explains installation under Kerberos 4. docs/TAPE.CHANGERS explains how to customize the changer interface. docs/WHATS.NEW details new features.

WHO DO I TALK TO IF I HAVE A PROBLEM?

Amanda is completely unsupported and made available as-is. Unfortunately, I just don't have the time to answer all user questions and help all new sites get started.

I do maintain the following mailing lists for those interested in Amanda:

==> To join a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list. Send mail to <listname>-request@cs.umd.edu, or with the following line in the body of the message: subscribe <your-email-address>

where listname is the following:

amanda-announce
The amanda-announce mailing list is for important announcements related to the Amanda Network Backup Manager package, including new versions, contributions, and fixes. NOTE: the amanda-users list is itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to subscribe to one of the two lists, not both. To subscribe, send a message to amanda-announce-request@cs.umd.edu.
amanda-users
The amanda-users mailing list is for questions and general discussion about the Amanda Network Backup Manager. This package and related files are available via anonymous FTP from ftp.cs.umd.edu in the pub/amanda directory. NOTE: the amanda-users list is itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to subscribe to one of the two lists, not both. To subscribe, send a message to amanda-users-request@cs.umd.edu.
amanda-hackers
The amanda-hackers mailing list is for discussion of the technical details of the Amanda package, including extensions, ports, bugs, fixes, and alpha testing of new versions. To subscribe, send a message to amanda-hackers-request@cs.umd.edu.

IS THERE AN ARCHIVE OF THE AMANDA MAILING LISTS?

There is a www archive of each of the amanda mailing lists:
  • amanda-announce
  • amanda-users
  • amanda-hackres

    That's It.


    Last updated on Tue Nov 12 19:05:56 EST 1996
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