Shon> Like I said its a rant. Probably a poor choice to post, but I've Shon> really been having some inexplicable problems lately and kirk'd Shon> out something bad this morning. Setting up Bacula to test Shon> certain things went relatively smoothly. Its been setting it up Shon> for production that has presented its biggest challenges. The Shon> documentation is immense and the learning curve is certainly Shon> challenging. If it weren't for the support of all the kind folks Shon> here, I wouldn't have come as far as I have. For instance, the Shon> full abilities of the commands aren't well documented. It Shon> required searching the bacula-users posts to discover that I Shon> could do "label slots=1-12 pool=scratch barcodes".
Hear hear! I want to agree with this statement comletely. The bconsole command and it's builtin help is a total mis-mash and not very user friendly at all. I've got a plan to sit down and sketch out more consistent and clear set of commands for manipulating bacula from the command line. Anyone else like the 'bcli' name? Personally, I like how Legato (now EMC) has done their command line tools and documentation and that's what I'm aiming to do. Of course, I need to find the time to do this. Shon> I did do something foolish the other day when I edited the jobs Shon> and ran reload in the console while a job was despooling. The Shon> conf wasn't correct (still trying to get the Windows Fileset Shon> syntax correct). Well of course the director puked and this is I Shon> suppose expected. What I didn't expect is that Bacula wouldn't Shon> be able to tell me what happened to the job, or that the data Shon> that had been spooled to disk would all be gone. This is when I Shon> started running into difficulty attempting to purge the tape and Shon> add it back to the scratch pool. In addition, I had a Full Shon> backup run on Sunday. I received email that the job was complete Shon> and was successful. Querying Bacula for any information Shon> regarding the job returned "no reuslts". Looking directly at the Shon> tables showed the Filename table did contain the filenames but Shon> the Job and File tables were empty. I don't believe this should Shon> have been the case, and there was nothing in mysql logs to Shon> indicate an error and none in Bacula logs. I am not unwilling to Shon> believe that there still could have been an issue with mysql. Shon> These are real concerns for me and trying to implement reliable Shon> backups. So you need to post your configuration and probably setup some smaller test filesystem(s) on client(s) to run full backups against so you can confirm what's up. But it does sound like you've got a major problem. Heck, I should do a test restore myself, or at least browse my backups to make sure I've actually got data on my tapes. I can certainly understand your frustration, it's not fun to have a backup finish and then you get nothing for you troubles. In this case, you need to look at the log files for both Mysql and Bacula. Make sure you have the proper permissions on the various tables, etc. John ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users