Morning
Though this short feedback from the UKUUG FAB:-
http://www.ukuug.org/events/seminars/fab/programme/ Files and Backup
Seminar may of general interest.
The two day Seminar, held in London 19th-20th February, was all about
backup and mainly Open Source backup. Overall about 50% of the talks were
of interest which is not bad for this kind of thing, the rest were OK and
only one that was the traditional death by powerpoint, courtesy of Novell
and some deranged data-center management system.
Kern Sibbald, lead developer and founder of Bacula gave a clear overview
of his system, which I use on a daily basis. He was a really nice guy and
we had a brief discourse over lunch. I thanked him for holding my backup
hardware together which is past it's three year sell by date, Open Source
is great like that:)
Red Hat talked about GFS2, I need to sit down and think about that one,
looks good though and especially relevant to my day job as is OpenAFS, a
secure file system which, I again, need to sit down and think about.
Cern's offering. Dr. Charles Curran, was great and very entertaining as a
near retirement Dr from the facility, who had been archiving vast and I
mean vast quantities of data from various particle accelerators for many
years described his never ending plight in a humorously lackadaisical and
slightly jaded way.
Tape-less backup was a theme and a Cambridge systems crew have been using
a fairly sophisticated remote backup facility called Oook, Ben Harris. He
provided a very detailed description of issues arising from attempting
tape-less backups for his department.
Of course there was yours truly who couldn't resist giving a lightening
talk at the end of the seminar to tout DIAP as an emerging tapeless
solution. The quick talk, 3-4 minutes felt well received, a couple of nice
rounds of
applause:) and a book for my trouble as I volunteered this talk.
All in all I have come away with loads of though provoking stuff. I feel
confident in my use of Bacula as a network backup tool and have more than
a whiff of the future of archiving without tape.
Day one slides are linked to here, not sure where day 2 slide got too:)
UKUUG FAB:-
http://www.ukuug.org/events/seminars/fab/programme/
My lightning talk.
Slides (pdf):-
http://www.diap.ecs.soton.ac.uk/DIAP_TALK.pdf
The UKUUG were accommodating and helpful, the Chair, Alain Williams, is a
big rsync user. The hotel was reasonable but the Internet facilities a
little shaky.
Damian
--
Damian Brasher
www.interlinux.co.uk
www.diap.org.uk
All mail scanned by clam-av
http://www.clamav.net/
