Installation and configuration of Amanda on CentOS 5.x.

Find appropriate versions of Amanda for your OS at the Download Amanda page.

wget http://www.zmanda.com/downloads/community/Amanda/3.3.0/Redhat_Enterprise_5.0/amanda-backup_server-3.3.0-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm

sudo rpm -i amanda-backup_server-3.3.0-1.rhel5.x86_64.rpm

This will install Amanda and create a system user for the Amanda program to run as. The installation should output something like this:

Oct 18 2011 12:07:22: Preparing to install: Amanda Community Edition - version 3.3.0
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22: Checking for 'amandabackup' user...
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  The 'amandabackup; user account has been successfully created.
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  Furthermore, the account has been automatically locked for you
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  for security purposes.  Once a password for the  'amandabackup'
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  account has been set, the user can be unlocked by issuing
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  the following command as root.:
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  # passwd -u amandabackup
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  If this is not a new installation of Amanda and you have
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  pre-existing Amanda configurations in /etc/amanda
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  you should ensure that 'dumpuser' is set to 'amandabackup'
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  in those configurations.  Additionally, you should ensure
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  that /var/lib/amanda/.amandahosts on your client systems
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  is properly configured to allow connections for the user
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:  'amandabackup'.
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22:
Oct 18 2011 12:07:22: === Amanda backup server installation started. ===

We need to have Amanda detect our tape drive/library, but first make sure a tape is loaded in the drive, or else amtaptype will fail.

sudo mtx status
sudo mtx load 1

Now test the tape. It will take like 5 hours to test the speed, size, etc of the tape:

sudo amtapetype -f /dev/nst0

After a while it will output something like this:

define tapetype unknown-tapetype {
    comment "Created by amtapetype; compression enabled"
    length 823948512 kbytes
    filemark 0 kbytes
    speed 115076 kps
    blocksize 32 kbytes
}
# for this drive and kernel, LEOM is supported; add
#   device-property "LEOM" "TRUE"
# for this device.

Save it somewhere, we'll need to paste it into our config later.

Create a config named "daily" from the example tape-changer config template:

sudo su - amandabackup
amserverconfig daily --template tape-changer --tapedev /dev/nst0 --mailto a.orth@cgiar.org

Edit the resulting /etc/amanda/daily/amanda.conf:

• add the "tapetype" block from above
• change "changerdev" to /dev/sg6 instead of sg1 (use dmesg and /proc/scsi/scsi to figure out where the changer device is)

Once your configuration is completed, run through a complete backup scenario to test if your settings are correct.

sudo su - amandabackup
amcheck daily

Other than errors about tape labels, the command should work fine.

Set up a "disklist" for the new config in /etc/amanda/daily/disklist.  For now, just do something like so we can test quickly:

localhost	/etc	root-tar

Use /etc/amanda/template.d/dumptypes and the disklist manpage as a reference.  I tested the "root-tar" backup type instead of the "comp-root-tar" as we’re using hardware compression, so we don’t need software compression!

To test our backup we’ll need to create a tape for Amanda to backup to.  Load a tape in the drive and then label it according to the "labelstr" in your config.

mtx load 1
amlabel daily daily-01 slot 1 -f

Backups are run with the amdump command (as the "amandabackup" user).

sudo su - amandabackup
amdump daily

Make sure you’re the root user!  Create a temporary place for us to test recovery of the last dump.

sudo su -
mkdir /tmp/restore
cd /tmp/restore
amrecover localhost
amrecover> sethost localhost
amrecover> setdisk /etc
amrecover> ls
amrecover> add slurm
amrecover> extract

amrecover will tell you which tape you need to load in order for it to extract the data.  In another terminal use amcheck and mtx load to make sure the correct tape is in the drive.  amrecover will restore using the tape defined in /etc/amanda/amanda-client.conf (see the comments in there for how to define it), or you can manually set the tape device in amrecover using setdevice /dev/nst0.

amrecover> exit

The restore might take a few minutes because the drive has to spool to the location of the file on the tape.  Be patient! The contents of the restore will be found in whichever directory you started the restore from, ie /tmp/restore above.

As the "amandabackup" user delete the tape you used for testing:

sudo su - amandabackup
amrmtape daily daily-01

4 tapes should cover all our data, depending on how well the hardware compression works on the tape drive.  Here I’ll label 4 (because we have 4 * 1.6 TB of max disk space on HPC)…

sudo su -
mtx unload
for tapenum in {1..4}; do mtx load $tapenum; amlabel daily daily-0$tapenum slot $tapenum -f; mtx unload $tapenum; done