Back to Newsletters DAVROM CONSULTING Newsletter - Issue # 06 - Dated: Fri Dec 7 10:31:40 EST 2001 From the desk of David Clark Well here comes Christmas again and another year will shortly come to a close. Now is normally a time where things are supposed to slow down and with the decreased number of users on servers, now is a good time to do some down-time maintenance and get to those tasks that you have put off since the year dot. Last issue I talked about VisionFS and Samba and just wish to correct something. The current versions of SCO OpenServer no longer ship with VisionFS as part of the bundled software. You can find Samba for OpenServer at the Skunkware website: http://www.caldera.com/skunkware Most of our work so far has still been primarily with SCO OpenServer which is still being purchased and installed by customers out there. We are also providing our Internet Gateway Server as a robust solution for companies wishing to have a quality connection to the Internet, of course the gateway is running Linux. Go to: http://www.davrom.com/internetgw.html To all the readers of the DAVROM CONSULTING newsletter, on behalf of Rose-Marie and myself, we would like to wish everyone a very blessed and Merry Christmas. I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark E-mail or URL If you are like me you probably get more e-mail than you can poke a stick at so I have been toying with the idea of offering readers of the DAVROM CONSULTING newsletter the ability to receive just the http URL link to the newsletter in the e-mails we send instead of the entire e-mailed newsletter. This works well as your e-mail is lighter and you can read the newsletter through your web browser instead. If you would like to receive just the URL via e-mail so you can click on the latest newsletter link to go to the newsletter via web browser, please let me know. The current and previous newsletters can be accessed via: http://www.davrom.com/newsletter.html Backups at OpenServer 5 sites I have recently been to a few OpenServer sites where they are only backing up their data or parts of the system. One site in particular I had to rebuild from scratch as they only backed up their data. While backing up data is essential, not backing up the application programs and the root filesystem that holds the users, printers, networking and other system modifications can cause considerable down-time. The ideal is to have a 'cpio' backup of the entire system running every night to a local tape drive in the actual server itself. This reduces the restore/rebuild time in the event of a server failure as well as giving you considerable fall-back should one or more of the media tapes be damaged. To find out if you are running 'cpio' under OpenServer you can type: dtype /dev/rStp0 and: cpio -itvcB where "rStp0" is the default SCSI tape drive. You can also use "/dev/rct0" as well in most cases depending on how there hardware was configured. You should see words to the effect of "old cpio format". If it says 'tar' format then you are using a utility that under SCO does not backup everything (or more correctly, cannot restore everything). If the output of 'dtype' shows "unrecognised data" then the backup may still be 'cpio' but was dumped to tape in compressed format. To check this please type: dd if=/dev/rStp0 | compress -d | cpio -itvcB | head Better backup strategies are essential as well as having the correct backup type. Consider off-site storage of backup tapes, say one per week. It can even just go home in someone's briefcase or purse - just so long as it is not geographically in the same place as the server. DAVROM CONSULTING uses 'dmctape' for server backups as it uses 'cpio' and offers diagnostics of the tape backup process as well. There is no warranty offered on 'dmctape' as it uses the UNIX shell environment which may be affected by conditions external to the script language - but it does use 'cpio' and does raise alarms if it believes there are errors. Lone-Tar from Cactus is one of the best backup utilities that you can purchase. It offers a 'tar'-like syntax and has a menu driven option on the emergency boot floppies to step you through a crash recovery. With the quieter time of the year upon us, perhaps it is time to review your backups. Linux servers can use 'cpio' as well but there are a host of others utilities out there as well such as "dump" (old UNIX dump utility) and "amanda". Lone-Tar is also available on the Linux platform. I shy people away from remote backup products like ARCServe on NT platforms. For reduced down-time and ease of restoration you need a local tape drive in the UNIX server running its own backup program each evening. If you have a group of UNIX servers then these can backup over the network to each others tape drives and hard disks. Remember, Thou shalt do thy backups daily. In the News Some quick news items. Caldera released in November, their Caldera Volution Messaging Server which is an Internet standards-based mail and calendaring server for Caldera OpenLinux and Open UNIX platforms. Fully integrates with mail clients and is aimed to provide a better server end to MS Outlook Products, Netscape and other clients. RedHat announced it will collaborate with IBM to deliver software solutions and the related services and support for the entire IBM eServer product line. RedHat 7.2 is now available and the new main feature is jounalised filesystems - which basically means it updates the filesystem as in a clean state more regularly during operation - this means if the power goes out or the server crashes, you have a greatly lessened chance of losing files on the system. Netscape Messenger If you are looking for a fully featured e-mail front end then I can certainly recommend Netscape Messenger, which you get for "free" with Netscape Communicator (also for free). In-house at DAVROM CONSULTING we run Netscape 4.76 on RedHat (my desktop) and Netscape 4.78 on our WindowsME PC (Rose-Marie's desktop). The files, such as the address books, can be shared between the two environments so swapping between operating systems doesn't matter. Netscape 6 is also available and can run with its new look and feel or can run in the old 4.x classic desktop. I have stayed with 4.x as I found 6 a bit more taxing on resources and it has also changed its file locations/directory layout. I will review 6.1 soon though. Netscape Messenger completely integrates with the other modules of Netscape Communicator which are Navigator (web browser), Composer (web page creator) and Radio (on-line radio - I don't use this one). Messenger also provides Internet news reading from news feeds under Messenger as well. Netscape also have their on-line messaging much like ICQ and you can host your web page with them as well (11MB for free). The e-mail is fully web enabled and offers a very simple to use mailbox storage system. If you are looking for the Outlook alternatives, I can certainly recommend Netscape as a fully integrated, robust front end to your web needs. In the past I have run Eudora on Windows which is also a great product but I keep coming back to Netscape. Tech Tip If you work with reading the archives produced by both SCO OpenServer and Linux and in this case, RedHat, you will find that the 'cpio' archives created on OpenServer need a specific switch to be read on RedHat. To read a 'cpio[ archive produced on OpenServer you need to do the following: cpio -H odc -itvBdum To actually restore the archive: cpio -H odc -ivBdum Oddly enough, the "-H odc" means old Posix.1 format (SVR4) and using the "c" (ASCII headers) option between the two does not work. The 'tar' command is portable between the two environments. Back to Newsletters 
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