I'm not running Linux, but I've run venti+fossil on Mac OS X for testing. I intend to use venti there regularly once I figure out how to get OS X to let me get at a raw partition that isn't mounted (anyone?).
I don't think venti+fossil will do what you're looking for, however, at least not without some additional machinery. Fossil doesn't do any replication or fail-over: it must talk to zero or one ventis. Venti doesn't automatically replicate anything, either, although that's pretty easy to script if you're willing to accept the exposure of a cron job. It's true you could run multiple fossils off one venti, but they'll be logically distinct (just getting the block aggregation benifits of sharing a venti backing store). I believe the Plan B folks did some work with fail-over (amongst other things) that might be applicable. Beyond that, if you want to get what you want from venti+fossil, you'll need to inject a filter in front of one of those two to do the fail-over (and handle all the fun of tracking writes and propagating them when the server comes back, and so on). If you're looking to back up *existing* Linux boxes, then fossil might not be what you want anyway. Take a look at vbackup(8) and friends (I'm trying to convince it I'm on an HFS+ partition). You'll have to figure out the correct procedures for your site, but the examples are pretty useful. Still no automatic fail-over, but a cron job could probably get you replication. Anthony
