network backup in a heterogeneous environment

[Marcus J. Ranum]

duncan at comp.vuw.ac.nz (Duncan McEwan) writes:

>All that is needed to support rdump is a way of running "/etc/rmt" via
>the rcmd(3) library call (ie via rsh(1).

	It's actually easier than that. Since /etc/rmt expects to be
reading and writing to its standard output, you can just put it (on a
UNIX box, anyhow) where inetd will launch it. On other machines, you
might need to put a few little hacks into it to make it bind a known
port.

	/etc/rmt doesn't have any notion of permissions, so I have a
version that reads an /etc/tapecap file with host/device/user permissions
and a bunch of similar stuff. This code is going to be released when
I've tested it for a while longer. (along with other useful supporting
code)

	There is some brain-damage in the rmt protocol - the tape ioctl
commands *assume* that the values of the mtops are the same, which is a
bit of a nono, and, more amusingly, in some spots it passes data structs
back and forth, without any concern at all with respect to byte order,
and whatnot. (the status/'S' op, for example). Unfortunately, lots of
people seem to use it, so it's hard to make it right. I thought about
fixing it for my version, but that meant I'd have to hack dump/rdump,
too, which is pure evil. For non-dump/rdump archives I have a client
that just handles talking directly to the remote rmtd and stores its
standard input.

mjr.