[9fans] How to maintain a venti server

[9fans] How to maintain a venti server

[Christian Kellermann]

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Dear list,

After reading through the venti paper and the relevant manpages some
questions still prevail:

+ How can I check the status of my venti server easily? The only
option I could find is reading through ventis status pages. Although
I couldn't read from that with abaco or hget...

+ How can I archive my venti? Heiko on this list mentioned burning
the arenas to a disk. Is there something like dump9660 for this? As
dump9660 works on a file basis only I guess it cannot be used.

+ Am I supposed to run maintenance tasks of ventiaux(8) on a regular
basis? If yes when and which?

+ I want to use a venti server as backup server for a some machines
in my network, plan9 and others. What are my best options? I thought
about using p9p's vac to copy the other machine's backups to venti, but I
would like to make them available again through a nice directory
structure a la dumpfs on the plan9 server. (Which in turn
could be exported via nfs)

Thanks for your thoughts!

Christian

-- 
You may use my gpg key for replies:
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Re: [9fans] How to maintain a venti server

[Steve Simon]

> + How can I check the status of my venti server easily? The only
> option I could find is reading through ventis status pages. Although
> I couldn't read from that with abaco or hget...
> 
You should be able to use hget or abaco to get venti's status.

> + How can I archive my venti? Heiko on this list mentioned burning
> the arenas to a disk. Is there something like dump9660 for this? As
> dump9660 works on a file basis only I guess it cannot be used.
>
arenas are created in 512Mb chunks so they will fit nicely onto a cdrom disk
for backups. This combined with a mirrored pair (or more) of disks
is enough to protect your server. If the machine burns down you can
rebuild the venti arenas, indexes and fossil all from just these CDROMS,
though this might take a few hours.

> + Am I supposed to run maintenance tasks of ventiaux(8) on a regular
> basis? If yes when and which?
> 
I never do any maintainence on venti, and virtually none on fossil either.

> + I want to use a venti server as backup server for a some machines
> in my network, plan9 and others. What are my best options?

Difficult to know, NFS should work I think, though I have never used it
and it may need a tweek to allow it to serve /n/dump (or a dump like vacfs).
also I don't think plan9 supports NFS3 so it would be as secure as... NFS.

Alternatively you can use the CIFS server (aquarela) to access
dumps from DOS and Linux, though it struggles with windows. This
has had some work recently so you may want to check it works with
your environment before commiting to it.

-Steve

Re: [9fans] How to maintain a venti server

[Russ Cox]

> + How can I archive my venti? Heiko on this list mentioned burning
> the arenas to a disk.

rdarena can be used to copy a sealed arena out for burning
to a CD or DVD.  wrarena can copy it back to the venti server.

> + Am I supposed to run maintenance tasks of ventiaux(8) on a regular
> basis? If yes when and which?

Those are only necessary if your disks go bad
and you are trying to clean up the pieces or
restore from backup.

> + I want to use a venti server as backup server for a some machines
> in my network, plan9 and others. What are my best options? I thought
> about using p9p's vac to copy the other machine's backups to venti, but I
> would like to make them available again through a nice directory
> structure a la dumpfs on the plan9 server. (Which in turn
> could be exported via nfs)

depends on what the others are.  if you are backing up
linux/bsd machines and don't care about seeing the
plan 9 backups from those machines, you could use
the p9p vbackup/vnfs programs.
http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man8/vbackup.html

russ

Re: [9fans] How to maintain a venti server

[geoff]

hget has worked for me, but only the four URLs mentioned in venti(8)
work.  Something like this should work:

	hget http://ventiserver/storage

Re: [9fans] How to maintain a venti server

[Skip Tavakkolian]

> I thought
> about using p9p's vac to copy the other machine's backups to venti, but I
> would like to make them available again through a nice directory
> structure a la dumpfs on the plan9 server. (Which in turn
> could be exported via nfs)

you could use webdav for importing. Kenji Arisawa did a port
of a webdav server for his version of httpd.

Re: [9fans] How to maintain a venti server

[Steve Simon]

> you could use
> the p9p vbackup/vnfs programs.
> http://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man8/vbackup.html

very, very neat.

-Steve