While I have been a bit quiet lately, I have been working on two new projects one is a BackupPC virtual appliance. An agentless backup and recovery system that also de-duplicates. There is a lot of discussion around technologies like Data Domain, Diligent, EMC/Avamar, and Asigra, this virtual appliance provides similar functionality for FREE. I am also working on a web based UI for this appliance to simplify setup and sync integration for replication.

Setup of the BackupPC virtual appliance is quite simple.

1. Start the BackupPC Virtual Appliance
2. The virtual appliance is setup to use bridged networking, it should receive a dhcp address on your network
3. Log into the BackupPC virtual appliance
   • Username: root
   • Password: backuppc
4. Identify network IP address
   • ifconfig -a
5. Open you desktop browser and point it to http://ip_address/cgi-bin/BackupPC_Admin
   • Username: admin
   • Password: password
6. Create a user “backuppc” on the windows hosts that you want to backup. Backups are performed via SMB so the “backuppc” user should have read access to the C$, etc… shares.
   • Note: Don’t forget to set the users password
7. vi /b2d_target/conf/config.pl
   • You will need to modify 3 variables in this file
     • $Conf{SmbShareName} = ‘C$’;
       • These are the shares that you want to backup
     • $Conf{SmbShareUserName} = ‘backuppc’;
     • $Conf{SmbSharePasswd} = ‘backuppc’;
       • The SmbShareUserName and SmbSharePasswd should match the username and password that you created on your windows host.
8. Add hosts to backup.
   • vi /b2d_target/conf/hosts
     • Follow the syntax in the file – the use of IP addresses is OK
9. Reload the backup configuration file from the web ui
   • Select “Admin Options” and “Reload Config”
10. You are now ready to start a backup

For detailed usage documentation see: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/

NOTE: [THIS IS OPTIONAL]

Finally the virtual machine is configured with a 300GB backup target disk (/dev/hdb2). This is Hard Disk 2 (IDE 0:1), if you need more space you should follow the following procedure:

1. Shutdown the virtual machine
2. Remove Hard Disk 2 and add a new larger virtual disk – See vmware docs for more detail
3. Login as root
4. /etc/init.d/backuppc stop
5. mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hdb1
6. mount -a
   • verify that the new device is mounted on /b2d_target
     • df -k
7. /etc/init.d/backuppc start

Please download and try this virtual machine, and let me know if you find any issues with the documentation. Enjoy!

[tags]virtual appliance backup recovery backuppc linux vmware windows agentless[/tags]