On 9/17/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Oren Beck</b> &lt;<a href="mailto:orenbeck@gmail.com">orenbeck@gmail.com</a>&gt; wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Concise statement of a non-trivial larger concept is to have a Linux server make timed backups of several windows systems in a zero user interaction format- and be able to remote restore those boxes equally &quot;no user assist&quot; required.
</blockquote><div><br>&nbsp;Define &quot;zero user interaction format&quot; and &quot;no user assist&quot;, which you&#39;ve already put in quotes..&nbsp; Do these mean that we&#39;re allowed one or more &quot;administrators&quot; as opposed to &quot;users&quot; to install and configure the system on the backup server(s) and Windows systems, or what, exactly?
<br><br>&nbsp;These periodic &quot;Make it simple enough for the dummies!&quot; exercises try my patience.&nbsp; There is a minimum amount of complexity involved in a backup system that can&#39;t be avoided.&nbsp; If nothing else, when the Windows side runs, if it does not pop up some message confirming that the backup was successful, the &quot;No news is good news&quot; trap is set.&nbsp; A failure of the backup software to run would be interpreted by the users as &quot;everything is OK&quot;, which it isn&#39;t. 
<br><br>&nbsp; I speak from painful experience here.<br><br>&nbsp; Another painful fact is that backup software running under Windows seems to be unable to back up files in use.&nbsp; I&#39;m not sure why this is, but I look at backup logs and see it all the time.&nbsp; The first lesson in the Tao of Backup (
<a href="http://taobackup.com/coverage.html">http://taobackup.com/coverage.html</a>) teaches that every file must be backed up.&nbsp; As Windows typically has open hundreds or even thousands of files, precisely those most important for proper functioning, this is a huge issue.
<br><br>&nbsp; The backup software we use for *nix backs up every single file on all mounted filesystems (with such exceptions as we may set up in a config file).&nbsp; It produces bootable media (CD or pair of diskettes) with which one can install a brand new hard drive, boot the system, and reload everything from tape, resulting in a fully-functional system.&nbsp; We don&#39;t have trouble backing up all the files under *nix, because the software doesn&#39;t try to open files in an exclusive mode.&nbsp; 
<br><br></div></div>&nbsp; I assume that the people who write the backup software aren&#39;t complete idiots, so that makes me think there may be a technical reason why Windows doesn&#39;t allow them to do a better job of it.&nbsp; It may be necessary to have software that writes an entry to the Registry, forces a reboot of the server, and then runs in exclusive mode during the boot.&nbsp; I&#39;ve seen programs like Partition Magic do this to solve exclusive access problems.&nbsp; A slightly-different approach might modify 
boot.ini (or whatever the Vista equivalent is) so that Windows doesn&#39;t even boot at all that time, but instead loads a Linux kernel to do the backup (and then reset boot.ini to load Windows next time).&nbsp; Or the Windows loader could be chained off grub.
<br><br>&nbsp; A lot of such details depend on the BIOS limitations.&nbsp; The proverbial &quot;Make it unhappen&quot; CD, which boots into Linux, checks the backup server(s) to see what&#39;s available (which might require some creative use of bootp) and offers complete images from which to restore a system.&nbsp; But you still will have choices to make.&nbsp; Someone has to decide how many images per machine to retain, then at restore time decide which one to use....
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