I am going to disagree with Bryn and Ana. The only reason to agree is human error and how the current SD configuration is implemented. Based on the number of queries on this list for managing devices, human error is prone to be high, and as for the SD configuration it is a static manual configuration file. I'd prefer a dynamic interactive SD interface that permits adding/removing devices on-the-fly. It's a harder implementation and a total rewrite. So, reloading the config file, once due diligence has been done on the OS level, should be permitted and it should replace what is currently in memory. Displaying a before/after config and requiring confirmation on the reload would "save" some folks.
Patti Clark Linux System Administrator R&D Systems Support Oak Ridge National Laboratory 865-576-7718 From: "Ana Emília M. Arruda" <emiliaarr...@gmail.com<mailto:emiliaarr...@gmail.com>> Date: Friday, October 24, 2014 at 9:20 AM Cc: "Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net<mailto:Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net>" <bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net<mailto:bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net>> Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Configuration reload for bacula-sd Hi all, I totally agree with Bryn. Even more when you think about your volumes. Bacula links volumes to devices and it is not a really good idea so frequent changes (deleting devices from bacula-sd.cionf) in your devices. This way you will have lots of trouble with volumes that does not have its device anymore. You should be aware of migrating these jobs before deleting devices from your bacula-sd.conf all the time. Best regards, Ana On Fri, Oct 24, 2014 at 9:55 AM, Bryn Hughes <li...@nashira.ca<mailto:li...@nashira.ca>> wrote: On 14-10-24 05:28 AM, Andrea Carpani wrote: On 24/10/2014 12:47, Kern Sibbald wrote: No, the SD and the FD cannot be reloaded. On the FD in principle it would be easy, but on the SD, it would be complicated if drives changed. What would you do with Jobs that are using a drive that would be removed from the reload? I'm not that deep into backup software, so maybe I'm saying something stupid, but a config reload could do the same thing that other software do, that is: - continue servicing current requests with the previous conf and - use the new conf for new requests. Something like a graceful restart apache does. Does this make sense? .a.c. Sense to humans yes, sense to program code not so much. The nature of the SD is that its configuration should almost never change - all it has for config is an inventory of hardware devices. There's a certain elegance in simplicity that would be lost trying to cover what should be a fairly narrow use case. Imagine all the debugging you have to do - is this job failing because it is trying to use the config as it appears in the config file, or some other config in memory from some time in the past? What happens if we now have different device names referring to the same physical device, we now need a whole locking mechanism that can cover the use case of multiple versions of the SD config accessing the same physical device, possibly with different parameters and names. How would you be able to tell which version of the config a given job is using? Remember it is easy to start a backup job that can last a couple of days - a full backup of a huge fileserver for instance. Things would get really messy really fast, with practically no benefit. Your SD config likely changes what, once or twice per year? If that? It is much safer to just restart the SD when you have an idle period between backups. Bryn ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
