We've got a linux box at Rackspace doing image serving duties and need to implement some sort of backup routine. Since we already use Retrospect 6, it would be really nice to be able to install the Retrospect client on the remote linux machine and back it up as such, but I don't know how to go about doing that - I suppose you could call me a newbie. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

I've not dealt with Rackspace, so I don't know... Do you have admin rights to the server so that you can install new software?

If you do, you can login to the server using ssh . Once there, you can download anything you might need with wget . Might need to untar the downloaded files with tar -xzf . Then follow directions in the README.

The second question is, what will you be backing it up to? If it's a remote server, it's kind of hard to swap tapes. If you are going to be backing it up to a local computer, it might be easier to use wget or ftp locally to grab the whole website. Do you need to backup the workings of the server, or just your images/pages?

I apologize for responding so late, I've been away for a few days. We do have admin rights to the server. Retrospect is neat because you can set it to back up preferred directories on a schedule. The Retrospect server is on premesis (local to us) and the data is/will be backed-up to a hard drive array as well as tape. Part of the problem is that we are Mac OS-based (mix of OS 9 OS X), so logging into the Rackspace box isn't as straight forward as it might be. At least, so far as I know.

If you have OS X, then you should be able to open a terminal and use ssh to login to the server... "ssh www.servername.com". Hopefully, OS X has ssh.

OSX definitely has ssh built in. Just install the retrospect client on the linux box. Be warned though, the client is built for Red Hat. It will take some extra configuration to run on some other distros. I have successfully set it up to run on Debian though.

Also, Retrospect has to be the server version to search for a client by address. This means that with the rackspace server being offsite, retrospect will not be able to see it unless you can type in the address as i believe that it only searches your current subnet when it searches for backup clients. I have done many backups to Retrospect this way and it works fine. It is a lot easier to use and offers me better peace of mind than the other backup solutions I have found for Linux or for any OS for that matter.

about installing the client on linux. If your linux server is Red Hat or equivalent the rpm download should install everything fine. If not, download the tar file and you may have to copy some files to different locations than the default Install.sh file is written to do.

Good info. I'll give it a go this afternoon. Thank you both very much for your help! Needless to say, I'll be back if I run into funkiness.

One more thing to add to this discussion, here is a link to a debian package that I found today.

http://dantz1.conxion.com/ubbthreads...b=5&o=&fpart=1

This will install the package onto a Debian box without further config.