Hello,
Recently, I bought a Windows Vista laptop ($$$ -- hint), so that I could test
the Bacula FD on it. First a few comments on Vista:
Good things (at least for users):
1. It has nice looking graphics
2. It has a lot of features
3. They sure are packing a lot of "3rd party" software into their kernel
(e.g. virus checkers, disk repartitioners, encrypted folders,
automatic file backup, ...). I wouldn't want to be
an independent Windows utility software vendor.
4. You right click on many menu items to get a lot more functionality.
5. They have installed the software in a much more reasonable set of
directory names (shorter and no spaces). If I am not mistaken, most
the old XP directory names are there too (sort of -- see below).
Not so good things:
1. It is pretty big pig -- it squats in 500MB of memory, uses about 60GB of
disk, and it took over an hour to boot up the first time, and quite a long
time the second time; after defragging the disk, it boots in a reasonable
time.
2. Although the new directory structure has more reasonable directory names
(shorter and no spaces), they have provided "junctions" to the old names
for compatibility. Unfortunately few third party programs such
as Bacula know about junctions, so they get confused, and typically
this manifests itself as references to files/directories that do not seem
to exist ...
3. VSS (Volume shadow copy) is not compatible with the older
code used by Bacula.
4. System services can no longer interact with the desktop, which means that
the Bacula tray monitor does not work.
5. There are a number new levels of security, which means that after
installing Bacula, you cannot edit the conf files without explicitly
finding the right dialog and changing your permissions on the files.
6. Due to junctions not being really downward compatible, the Bacula menu
links to the conf files complain that the file does not exist. By the
way, junctions have been around for a while, but were apparently never
used in a default install. However, on Vista, there are a lot of
junctions in the default install.
7. The new hard disk is 100GB the pre-loaded software uses 36GB.
8. Due to the need for swap space (2GB RAM) and snapshot space, the largest
size available to load Linux along side of Vista is 28GB -- i.e. as
mentioned above, the system needs 60 GB of disk, and this is a virgin
system (with the Bacula FD loaded).
So where are we with Bacula:
1. After 6 hours of upgrades to my WinXP system (62 SP1 updates, then SP 2,
then install .NET Framework, then install Windows SDK, perhaps I will have
the new VSS code loaded,
2. *perhaps* as their documentation claims, it is now a simple recompile with
new header files (I doubt it very much).
3. Junctions are another story, and I have no idea how much work that is
going to be.
4. Even if the new VSS works, it will only work on WinXP, Windows server 2003,
and Vista, which means that in VSS mode, it is unlikely that the Bacula FD
will support older systems (Win98, WinMe, WinNT, ...) as it currently does.
5. Time estimate: since I'm not getting paid for this: none.
Best regards,
Kern
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