[lug] Backup

[David L. Anselmi]

I'm out of time to say much more on this thread, but here's what I have 
so far...

Siegfried Heintze wrote:
> Boot server? Boy am I ignorant! I've never heard of boot server before.

That's jargon for the machine that provides a kernel via TFTP.  Here's a
good list of resources to understand all the details of PXE booting:

http://www.kegel.com/linux/pxe.html

[...]
> So can I buy a service that would let me network boot across the public
> internet and then restore the entirety of my bootable linux and windows
> paritions using rdiff or rbackup? Anyone have a URL?

Ask Google.  I'd guess you can't buy this service because I don't think
it's that useful.  But I'm frequently surprised by the services that
people think are useful so I could be wrong.  You may be able to buy
something like this for the "enterprise" (in this sense:
http://lair.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20050418/034692.html).

You can set up this service yourself with one spare machine.  You'll 
have to write your backups to it and give it DHCP, TFTP, a way to access 
the backup data (FTP, HTTP, NFS, whatever), and the boot image to do the 
restore.  Then you can test it out and see what your backup size is and 
bandwidth need for doing backup/restore.

Besides your actual backup data, you'll need an image to boot and a root 
filesystem to download or mount.  The root filesystem will need whatever 
tools you need to do the restore.

Honestly though I think it's more trouble than it's worth.

The main issue is doing your backups across the network.  My
incrementals run around 100MB (to over 400MB occasionally) on a simple
workstation (rdiff might be smaller, I'll have to play with it
sometime).  But a full backup (that you'd have to restore) is 3GB.  Do
you really want to wait for that to download?  My experience is that
backups across a WAN just don't scale.

So on top of backing up across the WAN you want to add the trouble of
maintaining a network boot infrastructure, when all you really need is a
CD you can boot from.

But hey, it might be a nice research project.  What's the best way to do 
this, what does it take, and how practical does it wind up being.  You 
can make a BLUG presentation about it (and CLUE and CO-SAGE might be 
interested in hearing it too).

Dave