Hello,
I am back from Paris where I gave my first Bacula presentation to a rather
distinguished group of people (3 French Ministers if I am not mistaken) who
were invited to an afternoon seminar presented by IDEALX, which is a company
that has its own software, but also attempts to match up OpenSource projects
with the government and large companies. They do it in a very positive way by
ensuring close cooperation with the OpenSource developers (e.g. Samba,
Nagios, ...) the use of GPL by the contributing institutions, and realistic
goals that are compatible with the Open Source project.
They invited me to speak, which I did for about 20 minutes. Hopefully this
will lead to some new Bacula power users, and perhaps some mutual projects.
The evening before, I invited two people to dinner -- David Barth, CTO of
IDEALX, and Eric Bollengier, who made a 2 hour train trip to be there! It
was a very pleasant evening, and also very productive because at one point
Eric asked me why I didn't just put the Bacula Recue code on a disk and let
the users use their own rescue disks. Although this is a solution, it didn't
please me, but it turned out to be a *super* idea, because it made me think a
bit farther. I took Eric's idea, and have now been about to remaster SuSE,
Madrake (renamed something else now ...), RedHat, and Knoppix rescue disks,
and in the process adding the Bacula generated files.
So thanks to Eric, I now know how to take just about any existing LiveCD or
Rescue disk, open it up, add some Bacula files and generate a new iso. This
gets me out of the bit pushing business of trying to create boot disks --
just let the distribution do it, and I can write some easy to use scripts
that will add all the nice stuff they leave out.
Of course, each distribution's CDROM layout is a bit different (Mandrake is
essentially a RedHat ...) so a small amount of knowledge is needed about each
iso, which I can obtain by just looking "inside" the iso.
What is even better is that this new technique can equally well be applied to
Mac OS X, Solaris, or FreeBSD rescue disks. Of course, for those systems, my
"Linux" scripts that collect the system info will need to be adapted.
The only minor downside to this is that the Bacula directory will be on the
CDROM rather than in memory when the system is booted. This means that the
rescue disk must be able to find the CDROM -- most do, but I noticed that
SuSE (I think) doesn't bother to mount the CDROM. I can provide helper
scripts in this case. With a little more work, it is possible to redo the
initrd (or the secondary ram disk) to include the Bacula files, but I'm going
to pass on this for the moment.
Anyway, thanks Eric.
I'm now off to "finally" make myself a 2.6 kernel Bacula Rescue disk :-)
--
Best regards,
Kern
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