Diving into Bareos backups
For the initial testing and familiarization, I am using burton.starp.bnl.gov (CentOS 6) as the central master. It has a 550GB filesystem under /scratch - enough for a small number of clients with modest retention times. Since they are not being backed up currently, I intend to start with trgscratch and sclrscratch (/etc/ and /home at a minimum), and use auteuil as the Windows testbed (with an eye on the shift-leader terminal as the first "real" client candidate).
On the master (burton), download the bareos.repo file for Yum, put it in /etc/yum.repos.d and then "yum install bareos". That results in the installation of the following packages:
I subsequently installed bareos-bat (Bareos Admin Tool), bareos-tools and bareos-storage-tape (none of which are necessary for backups per se). The packages are set up with an almost working set of configuration files for running all services on the install machine and backing it up. Not much needs to be adjusted in order to have a working system, but some things should be set, such as email addresses and at least one Device in the bareos-sd.conf (unless one wants to use the default, which is /var/lib/bareos/storage). I have set the "Archive Device" to /scratch/bareos/storage, and added that path to be excluded from the "Linux All" fileset.
Later, I also added the bareos-contrib repository and installed bareos-contrib-director-python-plugin-nsca, bareos-director-python-plugin and python-pynsca, which should provide a plugin to allow sending notices to Icinga about the backup status of indivdiual jobs. (see here: https://github.com/bareos/bareos-contrib/tree/master/dir-plugins/nagios_icinga ; I have not tried it yet...)
For just getting started, the docs are clear on what (little) needs to be touched:
http://doc.bareos.org/master/html/bareos-manual-main-reference.html#QQ2-1-62
though they do leave out that the Storage resource should be updated with a FQDN in bareos-dir.conf. For good measure, I set the original Client resource's Address to "localhost" instead of "burton". A nice thing to remember is that all of the Bareos config files can be tested for syntax with the -t option to the corresponding executable, ie.:
bareos-dir -t
bareos-fd -t
bareos-sd -t
bconsole -t
bat -t
Then there is the database. The documentation covers setting up the database well, and the provided programs for doing so are straightforward:
http://doc.bareos.org/master/html/bareos-manual-main-reference.html#x1-400002.4.2
A bit more detail about the database is available at:
http://doc.bareos.org/master/html/bareos-manual-main-reference.html#x1-30600028.1.2
The Bacula Webmin module (with obvious minor changes to the module config) appears to work with Bareos, though I have not tested if extensively. It is somewhat limited in supported options, in filesets it is very noticeable. For example, the use of "exclude = yes" in an option resource block cannot be represented or configured in the webmin module. (Open question - if there are options in the configuration file that Webmin doesn't understand, will it at least preserve them upon edits of known options?)
I soon hit a snag in testing backups. I tried to backup burton's root filesystem (/). It was clear that something was wrong pretty quick - the backups were using far more space than the files I intended to be backed up. There were two causes:
As a starting point for typical Linux backups, a "Linux Typical" fileset resource has been created as /etc/bareos/bareod-dir.d/linux-typical.fileset:
(note the default gzip compression level is 6.)
Encryption is straightforward and I have tried it (See http://doc.bareos.org/master/html/bareos-manual-main-reference.html#QQ2-1-463). I not yet tried using the master key to make a restore however.
The Windows FileDaemon has been installed on auteuil, and a "Windows Users" FileSet defined. Backups are successful (and actually change to a finished state, unlike prior Bacula trial).
On the master (burton), download the bareos.repo file for Yum, put it in /etc/yum.repos.d and then "yum install bareos". That results in the installation of the following packages:
- bareos-director-14.2.2-46.1.el6.x86_64
- bareos-database-common-14.2.2-46.1.el6.x86_64
- bareos-database-mysql-14.2.2-46.1.el6.x86_64
- bareos-filedaemon-14.2.2-46.1.el6.x86_64
- bareos-common-14.2.2-46.1.el6.x86_64
- bareos-client-14.2.2-46.1.el6.x86_64
- bareos-bconsole-14.2.2-46.1.el6.x86_64
- bareos-storage-14.2.2-46.1.el6.x86_64
- bareos-database-tools-14.2.2-46.1.el6.x86_64
- bareos-14.2.2-46.1.el6.x86_64
- libfastlz-0.1-6.1.el6.x86_64.rpm
I subsequently installed bareos-bat (Bareos Admin Tool), bareos-tools and bareos-storage-tape (none of which are necessary for backups per se). The packages are set up with an almost working set of configuration files for running all services on the install machine and backing it up. Not much needs to be adjusted in order to have a working system, but some things should be set, such as email addresses and at least one Device in the bareos-sd.conf (unless one wants to use the default, which is /var/lib/bareos/storage). I have set the "Archive Device" to /scratch/bareos/storage, and added that path to be excluded from the "Linux All" fileset.
Later, I also added the bareos-contrib repository and installed bareos-contrib-director-python-plugin-nsca, bareos-director-python-plugin and python-pynsca, which should provide a plugin to allow sending notices to Icinga about the backup status of indivdiual jobs. (see here: https://github.com/bareos/bareos-contrib/tree/master/dir-plugins/nagios_icinga ; I have not tried it yet...)
For just getting started, the docs are clear on what (little) needs to be touched:
http://doc.bareos.org/master/html/bareos-manual-main-reference.html#QQ2-1-62
though they do leave out that the Storage resource should be updated with a FQDN in bareos-dir.conf. For good measure, I set the original Client resource's Address to "localhost" instead of "burton". A nice thing to remember is that all of the Bareos config files can be tested for syntax with the -t option to the corresponding executable, ie.:
bareos-dir -t
bareos-fd -t
bareos-sd -t
bconsole -t
bat -t
Then there is the database. The documentation covers setting up the database well, and the provided programs for doing so are straightforward:
http://doc.bareos.org/master/html/bareos-manual-main-reference.html#x1-400002.4.2
A bit more detail about the database is available at:
http://doc.bareos.org/master/html/bareos-manual-main-reference.html#x1-30600028.1.2
The Bacula Webmin module (with obvious minor changes to the module config) appears to work with Bareos, though I have not tested if extensively. It is somewhat limited in supported options, in filesets it is very noticeable. For example, the use of "exclude = yes" in an option resource block cannot be represented or configured in the webmin module. (Open question - if there are options in the configuration file that Webmin doesn't understand, will it at least preserve them upon edits of known options?)
I soon hit a snag in testing backups. I tried to backup burton's root filesystem (/). It was clear that something was wrong pretty quick - the backups were using far more space than the files I intended to be backed up. There were two causes:
- The "One FS" option was set to "No" (the default is "Yes"). So the backups were backing up /scratch, which means it was going to try to back up the backups. Ack. [a related lesson learned - when doing 'show fileset="Linux All"', apparently options which match their default value are not listed, even if explicitely set in the configuration file.]
- The sparse file check is disabled by default. As it happens, I was also testing Docker containers on this machine, so had at least one sparse file for a container. 100GB of sparseness to be exact. Bareos was trying to back it up "non-sparsely". With the "sparse = yes" option in the FileSet, this is no longer a problem, though it does take some extra time to detect such files, since it has to compare each 32KB chunk against all zeros. (Could there be a problem with false sparse detection?)
As a starting point for typical Linux backups, a "Linux Typical" fileset resource has been created as /etc/bareos/bareod-dir.d/linux-typical.fileset:
FileSet {
Name = "Linux Typical"
Include {
Options {
Signature = MD5
sparse = yes
onefs = yes
aclsupport = yes
Exclude = yes
wildfile = "*/.journal"
wildfile = "*/.fsck"
compression = gzip
}
File = /home
File = /root
File = /etc
File = /var/spool/cron
File = /opt
File = /usr/local
}
}
(note the default gzip compression level is 6.)
Encryption is straightforward and I have tried it (See http://doc.bareos.org/master/html/bareos-manual-main-reference.html#QQ2-1-463). I not yet tried using the master key to make a restore however.
The Windows FileDaemon has been installed on auteuil, and a "Windows Users" FileSet defined. Backups are successful (and actually change to a finished state, unlike prior Bacula trial).
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