A simple RedHat question well if you are a Linux guy. I am mostly a microsoft guy but I do have a single RedHat 8 web server that needs to be backed up. The other 3 servers (Exchange, File, Citrix) all 2000 server backup to a single tape drive hanging off the file server with Veritas. The problem I have is I need to incorperate the RedHat server into this Scheme. I know that Veritas sells an agent for unix but I dont know how well it works remotely/backing up to a networked Tape. I have also heard about AMANDA and BACKULA but I do not know how well they work. So I'm looking for a unix/RedHat guru for a little guidance for a bare metal restore.

Dave

if you know the mount point for the tape drive, i think you can use cron to do your backups (weekly, nightly, monthly, or whatever).

cheers,
--vq

Thanks, But im looking for an app that runs on a MS system (2000 server) that can backup the redhat server remotely. If I must i can add a small tape drive to the redhat server and use a GUI app to run the backup. the problem is it must be simple because the person that will be checking the backup daily will not be a technical person just a general office staff member.

Thanks again,
Dave

We use the Veritas Agent for UNIX, which is free and ships with Veritas for Windows (certainly with v. 8).

Having said that, v. 8 was clearly written for older UNIXes and doesn't work properly with Red Hat startup and service control - sometimes the service doesn't start automatically after the server is rebooted.

One thing worth bearing in mind is that because the system cleanly installs and upgrades from packages you don't need to back up most of the files. The only bits that need protecting are /root, /home, /var and /etc.

Unless v. 9 Agent for UNIX is better, I'd think in terms of writing a script that compresses the directories above into one or more zip archives and uploads them to the Windows box, and scheduling it to run before Veritas on the Windows machine starts the tape backup each night. The only question is how to access the Windows system from Linux (presumably across a firewall) safely, since MS are the only OS vendor that doesn't support SSH... If the Windows machine has an FTP or WebDAV service (like IIS) going, then it's easy to make a share for this purpose. Configuring a firewall to pass SMB traffic from the Linux PC is possible but more of a security risk.

You could (like me) use lftp to mirror your Linux folders to windows XP, then back them up from there. Commands are (works on Fedora Core 1, not sure about RedHat 8)

lftp -u username <ip address>
password...
mirror -R <source> <destination> for reverse mirror
or
mirror <source> <destination> for normal mirror

(Not sure if I have described it right above. Check with "man lftp" first..)

Can easly be made into a daily script or something. Good if you have webserver on both windows and linux, and wants to mirror them both ways in case one of the two fails. I use Cerberus ftp server for XP machine (but you can use the built in one too).

An additional way to do this is to use tar to backup your Red Hat system (via cron, doing this before you other backups take place), have Samba set-up and place your tar archive in the Samba share (which is seen on the Windows machine) and incorporate that share into you everyday backups.

This may not be the best way, but it might work.

If your tape drive is available via the network, you may be able to set-up a different system/procedure for the linux machine(s). You should be able to tar directly to the tape drive as long as you system can access it. You can write a cron job to accomplish this.

These may help:
How can I perform backups for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system?
How do I use the tar command?