Category Archives: Dev Hours

bacula-fd authentication failed

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So, been trying to setup two-tier bacula. Stuck on cannot connect to client.

To grab more clues, run this line on bacula-fd machine:

sudo /usr/sbin/bacula-fd -f -d100 -c /etc/bacula/bacula-fd.conf

Then do bconsole dance on bacula-dir machine. Use “status” command to test connection to client. I you see cram-md5 authentication failed in bacula-fd output then you have the same problem as I did. Otherwise, check your connection between bacula-dir and nacula-fd

Here’s the solution:

in bacula-fd.conf:

Director {
  Name = bacula-director
  Password = "remote-fd-passwd"
}

“Name” should be your bacula-dir Name. You can found this in bacula-dir.conf. See below:

Director {                            # define myself
  Name = bacula-director
  DIRport = 9101                # where we listen for UA connections
  QueryFile = "/etc/bacula/scripts/query.sql"
  WorkingDirectory = "/var/lib/bacula"
  PidDirectory = "/var/run/bacula"
  Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 1
  Password = "blahblahblah"         # Console password
  Messages = Daemon
  DirAddress = 127.0.0.1
}

Then the password part on bacula-fd.conf should be the same with your client definition in bacula-dir.conf. eg:

Client {
  Name = remote-fd
  Address = remote.fd.ip
  FDPort = 9102
  Catalog = MyCatalog
  Password = "remote-fd-passwd"          # password for FileDaemon
  File Retention = 30 days            # 30 days
  Job Retention = 6 months            # six months
  AutoPrune = yes                     # Prune expired Jobs/Files
}

Don’t forget to restart bacula-dir and bacula-fd after modifying conf files. Good luck!

Bacula Backup Management

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So, been evaluating backup management solutions. Simple shell script won’t do good since I want auto-rotation, better scheduling and incremental backup support (storage friendly). Open source solution is a no-brainer priority. So, I’ taking bacula from bacula.org for a spin for a few days to understand how it works. So far so good. It has good scheduler with better-than-cron syntax, eg: 1st mon at 23:05 to schedule a backup on first monday of a month at 23:05. Neat eh? Installing Bacula in Ubuntu is a pretty straight forward process. There’s a fatal misconfiguration tho. It’s known and simple to fix.

The definition of the catalog Mycatalog contains a line starting with ‘ dbname = “bacula;”‘. The semicolon inside the quotes should follow the quotes, so should start with ‘ dbname = “bacula” ;’

Another tip, Pool resources by default are not enabling auto-volume naming. This is pretty annoying for a newbie. And it is way better to have it enabled by default to make it work out-of-the-box. To this, add label format option into your Pool resource definition. Something like this:

Pool {
  Name = File
  Pool Type = Backup
  Volume Use Duration = 23h
  LabelFormat = "VolFile-${Year}-${Month:p/2/0/r}-${Day:p/2/0/r}"
}

It will automagically creating proper Pool Volume when job runs, eg: Vol-2011-12-02.

You can use bat GUI to list your jobs and volumes. To restore files, see my tips here.

PS:

When you changed bacula-sd.conf, aside from restarting bacula-sd service do restart bacula-director service as well.

Javascript is the new cool

Aside

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Still on NLP. You’re read about UIMA and the Stanford parser (typed dependency) the other day. I’ve been wondering if there is an online service provider for Stanford parser. Lo and behold, there is. Although it is better to spend some cash and run my own Standford parser, this service should be suffice to test my idea. You can find it here, along with JSONP API to access it.

More resource on javascript and NPL, there are some on github. There are some Entity Extractors as well. And it concludes that some extractor simply cannot get away from using a dictionary. Maybe I will end up with one.