Personal Backup Appliance

[VMTN_Admin]

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/321

Backup, Restore, or Clone the Hard Disk Drive of any Computer or Virtual Machine over the Network!

[rxhui]

Thanks for the positive feedback, and I'm glad to hear that there is hope for people that can't get things working due to driver support issues. I will definitely look into making a client CD based on zenwalk, but it won't be until mid-November because I have to work on my business school applications.

Anybody else want to share a success story with another liveCD?

I'm actually looking for the best liveCD that has the best complement of device drivers.

[rw31]

Thanks for this awesome software. I do have one question though, I am looking to install this on a real machine and have this box dedicated to PBA. I saw earlier in the thread where you mentioned at some point you would put some documentation together on how to do this.

So just curious if you've had a chance yet.

thanks

[askeni]

What a cracking VM top stuff well done.

i have installed it and made a backup of a pc, all worked fine. I now want to configure a SMB share, i did try but being a complete noob to all this i am not doing too well, please could anybody help or put a noob how-to on for me.

Many thanks

where do you vote? as i give it 5/5

Askeni

[gbjbaanb]

Hi.

I have a feature request for the next version - the ability to create a boot CD that contains details to automatically restore a particular image.

ie. i backup a system, then create a bootcd that, when I boot off, doesn't bother asking me anything, it just fetches the backup I made and restroes using that. Obviously I'd need to edit a text file somewhere on the iso image before burning it, but that's ok.

I'd say the PBA server would need to be modified to run with a static IP (or a DNS name), and instructions for the client would be needed to provide a config file saying which server and image to use.

[rxhui]

Not yet, but not because I don't want to. I've been busy with other stuff. Please feel free to bug me about it once in awhile if you haven't figured it out for yourself yet. I plan on getting this done by the end of the year. I will be partially freed up in mid-Nov.

[rxhui]

good idea, I'll put this on my list.

[rxhui]

the short answer is:

1. edit /etc/samba/smb.conf, add a share (google for smb.conf syntax)

2. restart samba; sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

[askeni]

Ok having a really bad brain day.....

i am really having trouble setting SMB shares, when trying to edit the smb.conf it only comes up as read only, so i cannot ammend this. how can i edit this to put my shares in?

I am doing this wrong ? (hummm silly question as it is not working)

i have googled what you mentioned but managed to confuse myself even more about the smb.conf

many thanks in advanced for the help recieved

Askeni

[rxhui]

You need to edit smb.conf as root, and in ubuntu, you can do this by using sudo.

sudo vi /etc/samba/smb.conf

replace vi with your preferred text editor.

[askeni]

Hi

Many thanks for the help, now have the shares working at last.

askeni

[finnegan]

Hello,

great solution works like a dream. I have a couple of notebooks whose netork cards are not supported. How can I install the network card after booting from cd.

I would be greatful for every suggestion.

[finnegan]

Just to elaborate. I need to install a driver for a network card from marvel yukon.

Any suggestions.

Thanks.

[jmeador]

Thank you for the great appliance!

I ran across my first "network not found" issue today -- a Dell GX280 with an onboard Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit NIC.

I assume this is a driver issue because PBA has successfully worked with GX240 & GX260's. I tried the :

PBA 1.0.1 client disk

PBA slax 1.0.1b client disk

ZenWalk 3.0 live disk

System Rescue 2.1.9 live disk

None had the correct driver.

I tried Ubuntu 6.1.0 install/live disk -- and Success! I can now ping the network.

What files do I need to move from the PBA 1.0.1 client disk to be able to run PBA.sh?

Thanks-

J.

[kaso]

one of the first posts expained how to do it:

"

Once your linux is booted from the network, you can launch the client, by running the following.

as root, do this

\# wget http://192.168.0.100/pba.sh

\# sh pba.sh

(NOTE: replace the IP address with the IP address of your PBA)

One caveat. For this to work, your linux needs to have the supporting files that the script calls (most distros do) (e.g. wget, sfdisk, dd"

good luck

[rxhui]

Thanks kaso for the help. Yes, that procedure should generally still apply. Hopefully, the pba.sh file is still in the webroot of version 1.0.2; if it isn't, you can ftp the pba.sh file from the PBA server. There's a copy of pba.sh in the /home/vmware/pba/ directory. I usually run the commands from the /root directory on the client.

Using this procedure, I was able to successfully use SystemRescueCd from http://www.sysresccd.org as a PBA client. Perhaps I will start collecting a list of live CDs that work using this method.

[jmeador]

Hmmm... Still having a little difficulty. I copied pba.sh over. When I run sudo sh pba.sh, I fail with an infinite loop -- the read in line 22 doesn't like the -e param. Just for grins, I edited it out, but now the script fails with "dialog not found. PBA cannot start".

I'm assuming the Ubuntu live CD isn't complied with the packages needed to run PBA?

[dudelsack]

I just found this appliance and I find the concept intriguing. I tried it first with two windows machines without any luck. Backup stops with an error 1 in both cases.

But my immediate need is to backup a couple of DELL PRECISION workstations with RH Enterprise linux. They are still in a box and I would like to have an image before I am starting with the setup.

I am using the latest PBA version from sourceforge and the slax based client CD (the insert version one does not see the harddisk) to backup the 80 GB SATA drive. The backup ran smootly, So did the restore on a bigger (250 GB) disk.

However, after booting the restored disk, it freezes when initializing the SWAP space.

I looked at the partition tables of bothe disks (original and copy) and they look identical.

Any hints would be highly appreciated.

Matt

[kaso]

hi

try this:

boot restored os in single user mode, comment out swap line in /etc/fstab

then reboot normally (this time without swap)

recreate label for swap partiotion

good luck

[dudelsack]

Thanks kaso,

funny enough, when I booted the disk again, the system booted all the way. No idea what happened the first time. Anyhow, I am going to test restoring a couple of times to see whether it occurs again.

M

[dudelsack]

Now that I am having some succes with PBA, I am thinking about deploying it in a larger environment. The problem I see is that basically everybody who has a bootable PBA client can restore any machine from the server.

So far I removed the download link from the PBA website and disabled the SMB shares so people cannot easily find the PBA server or get their hands on a client. However, I think what is needed is some sort of authentication before somebody can backup or restore from/to the server.

Any thoughts?

Matt

Message was edited by:

dudelsack