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Date:      Wed, 21 Oct 1998 13:18:35 +0300
From:      Andrew Yourtchenko <andin@webclub.ru>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   not a Q, but sort of A...about Backups. my solution - if it's interesting to anyone ?
Message-ID:  <362DB4FB.B17C664D@webclub.ru>

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Hello, all.

I am writing here to figure out whether this can be of any interest to
anyone - in this case I will share withe pleasure my solution with the
FreeBSD Community.

Most typical appliance for the FreeBSD in the cases I have currently
seen - Internet mail/WWW/FTP server. File services are usually done by
Netware server, NT sometimes tries to do some DB-stuff.. or whatever.

FreeBSD server is being treated as an orphan child - no tape drives, no
other backup media. I know FreeBSD is stable and bla bla bla.. but
Backup never hurt anyone.

I have made a sort of three-tier backup system which i want to
introduce. It's as follows:

[FreeBSD] <---network---> [backup server] <----(1)-->[backup subsystem]

on Backup server a simple perl server program is running which allows:
1) accepting & serving one client connection simultaneously
2) during this session:
2a) receiving a 8-character name of file + its contents from the socket
and writing it to  backup subsystem
2b) reading a file of a 8-character name requested by FreeBSD from the
backup subsystem and sending it to FreeBSD via the socket.

client program on FreeBSD is capable of following:
1)getting from command line the IP address of Backup server, port to
connect to, and file name and operation - read or write.
2) accordingly to the operation, reading data from stdin and sending to
Backup server or getting the requested file from backup server and
flushing it to stdout

As of my understanding, we can instruct any backup-restore program to
work with stdin/stdout.

Furthermore, as Backup server program is written in perl, it can be
changed and extended the way you like (talking with ArcServe ? :)

Currently I have tested the backup server on a Win95 PC with ActiveState
perl on it,
writing data to the Novell server disk attached to it. Tar seems to work
fine. backup/restore - not tested yet.

One of the worst drawbacks here is security - there's NO security,
although it can be implemented at server basing on the IP addresses of
clients i think, and, you can use some port which gets filtered from
incoming connections. also, 8-character names. also - no error checking
at all - I assumed that since TCP has error-checking, that's enuf.

I've created a custom fixit disk for 2.2.7-RELEASE w/o cpio but
including my client part.
If this is of any interest - I will be glad to share ideas and source
(Actually, there's not much of a source - written in an hour... :)


--
---
wbr,
andin

http://www.webclub.ru/ - All-Russia webmasters' club.



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