AMANDA-INTERACTIVIT(7)						    Miscellanea 					    AMANDA-INTERACTIVIT(7)

NAME

       amanda-interactivity - Configuring Interactivity with Amanda Amanda

DESCRIPTION

       Amanda uses interactivity to ask user to load specific volumes when they are needed. This manual page describes the interactivity modules
       included with Amanda.

       This is a user-level description of the API, and does not address details that are only of concern to developers of new interactivity
       plugins. For that purpose, consult the Amanda source code, perldoc 'Amanda::Interactivity' and http://wiki.zmanda.com.

DEFINING INTERACTIVITY

       Interactivity is specified in amanda.conf(5) as follows:

       define interactivity $interactivity_name {
	  comment "$comment"
	  plugin "$pluginname"
	  property "$PROPERTY_NAME" "$PROPERTY_VALUE"
	  ...
       }
       and then referenced in the global section as

	 interactivity "$interactivity_name"

       Interactivity properties, like Amanda configuration parameters, are insensitive to case, and - (dash) and _ (underscore) may be used
       interchangeably.

       See the individual plugin sections, below for properties applicable to each plugin.

INTERACTIVITY MODULES

       Amanda provides three interactivity modules, tty, email and tty_email.

   TTY
       The tty interactivity module uses the tty to communicate with the user, it works only if a terminal is available, which is the case if
       amanda is executed from a command line.

       When promted for a volume, the user must put the requested volume in the changer and type <enter>. User can type the name of another
       changer if the volume is available in that changer. Typing 'abort' will abort the operation.

   EMAIL
       The email interactivity module uses email to send requests to the user, and reads replies from the filesystem.

       The email module has many properties:

       check-file

	   If set, amanda will check this file for user input.	The user can touch the file to tell amanda that the requested volume was inserted
	   in the changer.  If the user writes the name of a changer into the file, Amanda will use that changer.  If the user writes the word
	   'abort' into the file, the scan will be aborted.

       check-file-delay

	   Default: 10. This integer property indicates the time in seconds between each check of the check-file.

       mailto

	   Default: global value of mailto.  The email addresses to which the email should be sent.  If multiple addresses are given, they should
	   be separated by spaces.

       resend-delay

	   Default 0. The time in seconds between emails.  Amanda will resend the same email at this frequency, which can be useful if mailto is a
	   pager or phone.  If set to 0, only one email is sent.

   TTY_EMAIL
       The tty_email interactivity module uses the tty module if a terminal is available and uses the email module otherwise. Its properties are a
       combination of properties from each module.

EXAMPLE

	 define interactivity "by-tty-or-email" {
	   comment "Send email on runs from cron; use terminal on command line"
	   plugin "tty_email"
	   property "mailto" "admin1" "admin2" "me@home"
	   property "resend-delay" "1800"		#every 30 minutes
	   property "check-file" "/tmp/email_input"
	   property "check-file-delay" "10"		#every 10 seconds
	 }

SEE ALSO

       amanda(8), amanda.conf(5)

       The Amanda Wiki: : http://wiki.zmanda.com/

AUTHOR

       Jean-Louis Martineau <martineau@zmanda.com>
	   Zmanda, Inc. (http://www.zmanda.com)

Amanda 3.3.1							    02/21/2012						    AMANDA-INTERACTIVIT(7)