UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi guys and gir.. emm

hey guys! (only kidding girls)

I have been asked to provide a tutorial on how to perform an automatic back up (to tape) for 23 sun sparc workstations networked using an ethernet setup under the UNIX operating system.

Sounds easy enough to you... I've never ever seen UNIX in operation never mind being able to produce a tutorial.

could anbody help me out? even some of you gurls?

Mucha appreciated

Mark 8 )

Yeah, you got a real problem.

What kind of backup will you be doing? Do you have software, or just planning on using tools provided by every major unix vendor? Is NFS installed and configured?

If I were you, I would start looking at NFS, auto mounting file systems, crontabs, tar, cpio, and dump.

You can use ufsdump on Solaris to perform backups across the net. You will need to set up .rhosts files on the box with the tape drive/library for each remote user that will want to run a backup from a remote machine to the tape server. The only problem is that .rhosts opens up a security hole, but if you're behind a good firewall and you're careful about what you put in .rhosts, you should be okay. See the man page for ufsdump on Solaris.

Caveat: The ufsdump command supports Sun's ufs filesystem and is not portable, so it's not a true UNIX solution, but it will do the job for Sun's running Solaris.

Since you're starting from scratch and you don't know unix, you may want to consider buying a product. We use netbackup and we like it. Click here for more info on netbackup.

Legato is another good backup solution