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[...] a friend of mine works for Veritas (the development office in San Luis Obispo, CA). So it's interesting to read.
I've heard the phrase “your computer is our learning experience” related to OSS many times from those who detract the concept. Yes, there are plenty of packages that do this. However, you are right in that Debian, and especially Ubuntu, do an excellent job of mitigating the risk. [...]
I do agree that commercial packages tend towards having better testing / quality control. At least, for the ones that cost over $500 USD. For anything cheaper, I'm usually happy with the OSS equivalent.
So far, Bacula has been amazingly cool. Once you learn the configuration file format (which is well-documented, amazingly), it's easy to administer. However I have yet to do a bare-metal restore. Perhaps it's time to try. Even if it doesn't have an atomic restore process, installing Ubuntu server and apt-getting bacula-fd takes less than 3 hours.
Regarding the “learning experience” quote… you and I learned it in the same place, and I only wish I could write technology fuck-up-ed-ness screeds with
The only Symantas (his word, not mine, but I love it) friend I have we hired away from their third tier NBU support already. I'd probably have some others related to VxVM, but my relationship was purely of the professional nature, because I was too young in The Business to bother given my real email address to people who I observed had A Clue. By which I mean that I hadn't been doing this long enough to wager them (their currency) Australian dollars that I could do what their tech notes said I shouldn't be able to. (A canonical example involved Oracle, a smoking pile of rubble disk array, dd(1), cat(1), undocumented arguments to vxprint(8M), and one of several explanatory emails to somebody @veritas.com generating Tech Notes that I'm happy to leave as anonymous, if just to avoid the flashbacks if some poor bastard on the Internet saw my name, asked Google, and offered even twice my usual consulting rate. Not because it wasn't fun, but because the place they work for is, based on personal experience, so fucked up by the time they need that that I don't want to touch it for fear of third degree burns.)
Anyway, enough of that bullshit.
I have to say that I was Very Impressed by what Bacula claims as design principles, and what they allege they've got working. It looks a lot like what I'd do if I had enough enamel left on my teeth to write it myself, rather than grind the rest off in fury at what the commercial entities involved fucked up over the remaining years I can cope with the whole concept absent the prevailing urge to slit my wrists in a hot tub. (But if you think that's bad, consider the poor sods who work there… these people, and I know several of them after visiting them in MN last summer, just shake their heads and literally bite their tongues when you mention the things That Product does moronically, then contort their faces appropriately around the Party Line in response. At least, until you get them drunk… which I can understand. Ask me about the US credit card industry some time, but plan on paying for a few Tanq 10 martinis.)
I've been reading too much Hunter S. Thompson. Bacula looks like it's made by people who've suffered through, each of them, at least two of NetBackup, TSM, NetWorker, and maybe a smaller name or three. They understand why what these commercial products are trying to do makes sense, but they also know what those poor bastards ended up reluctantly permitting onto the release builds based on product managment time tables, and they understand that better than the people who wrote it, because they actually had the environments to scaletest these things. (It should not have been, but it very much was, an awakening in Minnesota to realize that Symantas hadn't a prayer of testing scaling at the levels that $CURRENT_EMPLOYER views as standard production environments… neither does EMC, neither does Hitachi, neither does Cisco, neither does… you get the idea.) Maybe in about 20 years when I've been doing something else for 10 and it spells something other than immediate psychic pain, I'd like to be involved, but they got there first becuase they started on the twenty before I did, and more power to them.
On bare-metal restores, or any DR test, really, things will not go as planned. Make certain you write all of them down. Including the “son of a bitch, we didn't have the right image for {jump,kick,whatever}start” ones. Yeah, sure, it's “human error”, but you get plenty of human error when the bombs are coming down or the water's coming up. I question the validity of any DR test done in a time zone within 6 hours of that to which those doing the test are native, during which food is prepared by the pizza joint on the corner rather than on top of Sterno cans, and using any computer for interface that's functionally capable of presenting a GUI, much less a web browser. Anything shy of emulating nuclear winter (or maintaining constant Internet presence post-Katrina from even the relatively untouched CBD; that blew my shit away) is insufficient to prepare you for the levels to which things will go wrong when some dickhead flies a plane into the corporate office. So, you play some games that look a little bit like that, and hope that you've got a very long line of cocaine when the feces actually hits the propeller. Or you can get the fuck out of my kitchen. There's only enough room for 1.5 people to cook in there, and I've got dibs on the sleeping bag space on the floor.
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