det@hawkmoon.MN.ORG (Derek E. Terveer) (05/24/90)
In article <1990May17.220613.21280@unx.sas.com> kent@mozart.unx.sas.com (Paul Kent) writes: > Where do you put the user directories? > > distributed over the 20 odd departmental file servers > on each individuals workstation. (along with OS and swap space) > > I would appreciate any notes from people with setups like this, > on the pros and cons of centralised user directories, and the > management of all the NFS cross mounting. One potential problem that i see is how to back up distributed user's directories. If they are centralized, they can be more easily backed up. derek -- Derek Terveer det@hawkmoon.MN.ORG
david@indetech.com (David Kuder) (05/29/90)
In article <1990May24.071122.7009@hawkmoon.MN.ORG> det@hawkmoon.MN.ORG (Derek E. Terveer) writes: >One potential problem that i see is how to back up distributed user's >directories. If they are centralized, they can be more easily backed up. One strategry that has been re-invented in several different forms is to copy the data on local disks onto the central servers. The schemes range from doing network file system mounts, to doing backups on the individual machines and shipping the tape images over the net to the fileserver. Check out the proceedings of the Large System Administration conferences held by Usenix the last several years for details. -- David A. Kuder Looking for enough time to get past patchlevel 1 415 438-2003 david@indetech.com {uunet,sun,sharkey,pacbell}!indetech!david
dan@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca (Dan Trottier) (05/30/90)
In article <1990May28.232017.9279@indetech.com> david@indetech.com (David Kuder) writes: >In article <1990May24.071122.7009@hawkmoon.MN.ORG> det@hawkmoon.MN.ORG (Derek E. Terveer) writes: >>One potential problem that i see is how to back up distributed user's >>directories. If they are centralized, they can be more easily backed up. > >One strategry that has been re-invented in several different forms is >to copy the data on local disks onto the central servers. The schemes >range from doing network file system mounts, to doing backups on the >individual machines and shipping the tape images over the net to the >fileserver. Check out the proceedings of the Large System >Administration conferences held by Usenix the last several years for >details. We back up clients machines from the fileservers via the rdump command. The difficult part was deciding on how to coordinate the dumps. The solution was to run everything from one of the servers and use the following commands to dump the clients: # For each host in hosts[x] while ( $i <= $#hosts ) # and its corresponding filesystems listed in fs[x] foreach j ( $fs[$i] ) # start up rdump on each system to do the actual dump rsh $hosts[$i] ${rdump} ${dhost}\:${dev} $j >>& ${dumplog}.${ext} end # move on to the next host @ i++ end This is run in the middle of the night and dumps incremental backups to and exabyte drive. The dump level can be controlled to either maximize file recovery or minimize tape usage. -- Dan Trottier dan@maccs.dcss.McMaster.CA Dept of Computer Science ...!uunet!utai!utgpu!maccs!dan McMaster University (416) 525-9140 x3444