OT: Edge on Linux - Issue.

[Fairlight]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 04:24:23PM -0400, after drawing runes in goat's
blood, Alias for filepro cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> 1) /media is considered a system directory in Linux. It contains only
> mount points, and causes large, irrelevant backups when things are
> mounted. These generally cause lots of headaches, full tapes, etc.
> http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#MEDIAMOUNTPOINT

All I'm going to say about that is that, like the first several versions
of FSSTND, it's non-binding.  Not every distribution obeys either the
document you pointed out or FSSTND.  They technically should, but there's
zero guarantee.  There are some things that are required (ie., try doing
without /usr ...good luck!).  The rest are merely guidelines, and the word
guidelines is even used in the first full paragraph of the document you
cite.  Which means Edge takes it upon itself to think for someone and try
to follow/enforce a standard that the OS itself may not even be following.
I don't think that's appropriate.

That said...

I actually -agree- that /media is only supposed to be used for media
mounting hardpoints.  I fully agree.  No argument at all.

However, if I -wanted- a backup of the system with media mounted, I
shouldn't have to go out of my way to get it.  I'll just agree to disagree
on that point, since it's basically tightly bound to some special
cases--none of which apply to what the person who set up the old system
actually did.

> 2) When you install BackupEDGE, one of the last things it does is pop up a big screen that says nothing but...
>     Excluding /media directory from backup automatically!
>     
>     You MUST press Enter to continue.

I didn't install Edge on the old machine on which the backups were made, so
I wouldn't have seen that until after it was too late.

That said, I don't actually recall seeing it when I installed Edge on
the new machine, to be honest.  I'll take you at your word that it does.
When I installed it, I was actually more focused on getting to the point
that I could restore the old data, to be honest.  It wouldn't have made a
difference if I'd seen it--it was almost a month too late, as the machine
was taken out of house for a rebuild.  I didn't know until two days after
installing Edge on the rebuilt system that the data from the old system had
been stored under /media on the old box in the first place.  Nobody knew
except the guy that never bothered to double-check his work, who put it
there in the first place.

> It really doesn't matter what the instructions are when a product's
> install program sends you a message. Ignoring them can have bad
> consequences.

As I said, I wasn't the one that ignored instructions on the original
machine.  Nor was I the person that obviously couldn't be bothered to check
the tape contents for over a year.  *shakes head*  Those are neither
Microlite's fault, nor mine.

> We see this most often when people install our product in 60 day demo
> mode, and it prints the date the product will stop working during
> installation (and waits for an approval), and then every day in printed
> and emailed backup reports when the 60 day period is about to end (and
> when they run edgemenu), but when they call us after the demo has run out
> for an activation it is an emergency. There's only so much a company can
> do.

Different sort of thing.  That's a business model issue.  What happened
here is a technical semantic issue.  Thing is, it may be on a splash screen
at install, but even according to your own tech support guy (I called),
it's not documented in the user guide, or anywhere that tech support knew
about.

The old "admin" -claims- that he read the user guide, but he was such a
screwup that i highly doubt he would have read it if it'd been in 144pt
print on page 1 of a manual.  I doubt he even read the docs, even though he
claimed he did and that he didn't see anything about it.

> Others ignore all the reports, never change the tape, never clean the
> tape drive, and then something bad happens. Our support email box is full
> of interesting stories.

I've seen disasters.  A customer of a client of mine had (they thought) two
weeks' worth of backups.  They went to restore some files that got majorly
trashed, and their tapes were bad.  Turns out that 1) nobody was reading
root's emails, 2) they'd lost the console monitor a few months prior.  So
nobody knew that the backups were failing.  Essentially it was bad media,
all the way.  I would think that tape being OFF the spools would have been
a dead giveaway, but ya know...  *shrug* 

I've seen my share of stupid things that were -not- Edge's fault where it
was deployed.

> That doesn't solve your problem, I know. I guess you needed to vent to
> someone. But someone put files where they shouldn't have AND ignored
> BackupEDGE's warning warning that it wasn't going to back them up.

Well, I dunno about venting.  I was pretty frustrated, but...  Venting
wasn't actually my primary purpose, or even something I was consciously
thinking of at the time.

What I -was- thinking at the time, was that if I'd used cpio, or afio, or
even plain old tar, I'd have gotten a full backup as intended, unless I
-explicitly- excluded the directory myself.  Bit level verification aside,
I'd actually have been better off using any of those programs than relying
on someone other than myself having set up Edge correctly, apparently.
Edge is -supposed- to be very good, which made the situation all the more
galling, when a lesser utility would have actually performed the job I
expected from a Full Backup.

IMHO, the word "Full" is misleading for "Unscheduled Full Backup".  That's
my main point.  It's only as full as what someone (quite possibly other
than the person doing it) may have done to an exclude list that a person
coming in that hasn't worked with the product in a couple years might not
remember or even know about needing to check.

As tech support said it's not documented, perhaps it should be
documented--and not just in a big splash screen at installation.  Bring
in anyone unfamiliar with the product who didn't install it, they won't
even be aware, as it's not documented in the user guide (this is according
to your tech support guy when I asked him point blank, "Is this behaviour
documented?" and the answer was negative).

You know, maybe I was unclear in my original post...  I 99% blame the
original git that made not one, but two huge errors, both in locating
the files where he did, and in not checking the tape manifests for over
a year.  The 1% where I blame Edge is in failing, for all its strengths,
to do what a simple, plain old tar, afio, cpio, et al would have done
by default--which is give me a full backup when I don't explicitly say
otherwise.  And I honestly had no idea I was saying otherwise by default.
That's where the frustration comes in.

That said, the data's pretty much gone, we're trying to scrape what we can
(minus 18 months' worth) from other sources that were in-house.  What's
done is done.

Just -think- about at least slapping it into the manual proper if it's not
already there, though?  -I- know now, but others may not.  A splashscreen
at install is not necessarily the best sole place for this, for the
aforementioned reasons.

Bests,

mark->