Thanks for coming back to me. Just to clarify my situation, I started a little company 3 years ago and wrote a linux server distro (based on Gentoo) which we now have running in about 50 SME’s all over the country (South Africa), our staff compliment is now 15 and we look after roughly roughly 2000 end users. We are a remote support company which uses the server as a drop in replacement for MS SBS and so it handles all the remote support (VNC) routing, backups (offsite via anastasi, an open source offsite backup app I wrote a while back). While we have implemented alot of open source products to provide our service, such as VNC, Cyrus Imap, OpenVPN, Rsync, Exim SMTP, Pidgin [Jabber], I haven’t been able to find an open source product that does what yours does with the ease in which it does it. I wrote a small backup app based on the mounting of samba shares then rsyncing the contents over, but this is unfortunately prone to nasty little errors, the main one being that we can’t backup a live PST file, which yours seems to do (I assume via Volume Shadowing).
Anyway, I digress, I want to roll your app out to my 50 servers/2000 end user machines to facilitate the backing up of the client workstations, and telling you my little story up there will illustrate why I need what I need, so let me clarify a little.
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The pc label is important because a) sometimes there are duplicates on the network, b) we name machines 1-100 internally, which allows us to vnc into them/find them on the network regardless of their name, because we allocate them an IP based on their machine number. So what I would be looking for is the ability (on the client side) to not use the pc name to identify the machine, but rather change the label to say “machine_12” so we can identify the backups more readily on the server and thus restore them. e.g. Under settings, a place we can set the label to be used (it would default to the windows machine name)
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The label of the backup path is important because if I add say “My Documents” to the backup path, you convert that into “My_Documents” to identify that backup path on the server. Now I see in your sqlite database that you have the path and the name in there. I have already hacked one of my test clients and changed its path name to something else (in the backupdirs table) and it just works with its new label on the server. Here it is…
sqlite> select * from backupdirs;
E:\My Documents|1|My_Documents
C:\Documents and Settings\Darren|2|Darren
C:\Lxkx75|3|mytest
You can see the last entry should be named Lxkx75, but its named mytest and so the result on the server is
root@mooplewump:/data3/BACKUP/urbackup/test/current# ls -la
total 20
drwxr-x--- 5 urbackup urbackup 4096 2011-04-30 19:47 .
drwxr-x--- 14 urbackup urbackup 4096 2011-04-30 19:47 ..
drwxr-x--- 16 urbackup urbackup 4096 2011-04-30 19:47 Darren
drwxr-x--- 3 urbackup urbackup 4096 2011-04-30 19:31 My_Documents
drwxr-x--- 4 urbackup urbackup 4096 2011-04-30 19:47 mytest
The issue occurs if I have both Jane and Jon logging into machine 12, now I want to backup My Documents for both of them. So one gets My_Documents, the other gets My_Documents_0. So which is Janes and which is Jons. I also see that the moment you add a path, my hack gets reset, i.e. c:\Lxkx75 reverts back to being called Lxkx75.
So my request here is if we can set this via the GUI, so when I setup Jons My Documents, I can Label it “Jons_My_Documents” etc. Is that a hard thing to do?
- I think you get me on this.
Regarding you being willing to make the changes, I think thats just magic thanks man. I am a very aggressive tester, because I am rolling out volume so if it were to break, I would get it in the neck from all my clients. And when it comes to GUI’s, I know next to nothing about writing windows code, but on the server side, I can get some of my staff to work on the server side GUI and also make a nice windows Tray Icon. Would that be helpful?
As an aside, there is a bug in your server, if you connect to the 55413 port with a browser, you crash the server app.
BTW, thanks for being so open in your responses, I would like to see this little app of yours get really big.
