Omniback on Debian Linux

[Tom Warren]

Hello everyone,

We had a few go arounds with HP to get OBII 4.0 to work on our Linux Servers and we wanted to share them with the Community.

We had to tweak the .util portion of omniback client to get it to run on Linux.

1) nslookup has been deprecated by the makers of BIND. Basically it will be going away and they are persuading users of 'nslookup' to use other means like 'dig' and 'host'.

This is what the latest versions of nslookup are spouting:
----
Note: nslookup is deprecated and may be removed from future releases.
Consider using the `dig' or `host' programs instead. Run nslookup with
the `-sil[ent]' option to prevent this message from appearing.
----

We added the "-silent" option to 'nslookup'. Actually we did it as a shell variable so as to not toast cross-platform functionality. See attached code.

2) Support for reiserfs and xfs.

The getBdf() routine needed "-t reiserfs" and "-t xfs" added to the /bin/df line of the gpl/i386/linux section of the case statement.

Given that this is an app riding on top of the OS, it shouldn't matter what file system is underneath. I can see not wanting to back up NFS mount points, however, wouldn't a better method be to get a "df -P" of everything, use a "df -P -t nfs", and then filter the nfs mounts out of the original "df -P"?

Feed "df -P" a "-t fredsfilesystem" and it does not error out. It only shows no file systems.

All is working great and I am able to backup our 5 linux systems with no problems.

Questions? Comments?

Thanks
Tom

[Eugen Cocalea]

Hi,

I don't use Omniback nor Debian. I do use RedHat boxes.

Anyway, I've read your post carefuly and I want to thank you for sharing the solution to us. Usualy, people don't even reply to their posts to say what from the answers solved their problem.

I bookmarked your post anyway, maybe (who knows?) I will need to install Omniback on Linux and I will don't know where to start :)

E.

[Chris Calabrese]

This kind of stuff doesnt' surprise me at all. The OmniBack stuff was written for HP-UX and ported later to Linux. When you're doing ports like this, you only fix what's broken. If their Linux porting base worked, than the team probably considered their job done. I'm guessing that would have been something like a totally vanilla install of whatever was the latest Red Hat release at the time.