lifebsideben

I’ve been continuing the work I was mentioning in the other Bacula post recently. A couple tasks, especially:

1. Making incremental backups work from the Mac. Full backups work fine, but incrementals just die with the client claiming it doesn’t know what an incremental backup is! Weird.

2. Getting long-distance (over the public ‘net) backups of my website working.

So the first one, had two major hiccups, but basically one solution. The Mac would get ’stalled’ if GZIP compression was enabled on the backup… semi-randomly. I fixed this by just disabling compression, which is no big deal since the client and server are on a 100mbit wired network and not a ton of stuff changes. But, the bigger problem was that “incremental” backups were not working at all. I’d see odd messages like “Unknown backup level: incremental”, which was confusing. Seems others are having the same problem but didn’t offer a solution. I finally decided to upgrade from the version of the bacula client offered via fink, to the same version I was running on the server (still not the absolute latest and greatest, but the latest in the 1.x line.) I was pretty concerned about being able to compile this successfully, as fink didn’t have patches for it, but it went without a hitch. Here’s what I used to configure it:
./configure --enable-client-only --without-x --with-fd-password=bensmacfd --with-dump-email=ben@prince.org --with-job-email=ben@prince.org --disable-build-stored --disable-build-dird --enable-largefile
which built just the client (all I care about) right off the bat. I did notice there was a ‘darwin’ Makefile.in in the platforms dir in the source tarball, so I guess they’ve merged back some of the patches from fink (or close enough).

Anyhow, that build seemed to fix the “incremental error” problem, and I suspect the gzip issue as well, although I only did a quick test of that–not a full backup. It still might get stuck on the next full one, we’ll see.

As far as the remote backups of the webserver, that’s been more frustrating. I’ve had to figure out how to open a hole in my home firewall through the el cheapo router, add tcpwrappers, and get a version of bacula compiled on redhat 7.3 (ancient, I know). Mostly that all works, however, I still can’t get backups to finish successfully. They start OK, and then get hung at some point sending data back to the home server. I’m beginning to think it’s the fault of my router’s port forwarding (from the WAN side to the linux box), since it’s randomly flaky. Or maybe it’s just network latency causing the issues. I don’t know, but it’s frustrating, as I really want to get this working. Ah well, gotta have something left to work on I suppose.

Oh yes, there’s actually one more thing as well–building the client on my wife’s Intel-based Mac and backing that up. I’m going to give that a shot shortly… although I’m tempted to just try and build a univesal binary from my machine, although I have no clue how to do that from the command line with standard configure/Make/etc.