Code V.igoro.us

Amanda joined the IPv6 revolution in November 2006 - all of the BSD-style authentication mechanisms can support IPv6 endpoints. However, it's generally agreed that this was a mistake, and in this post I will talk about why that's the case.

I just upgraded my Macbook to Snow Leopard, and the upgrade has changed the way SSH authentication works. I have set up a system I like quite a bit, now, and thought I would share.

Most of my posts in this series have been about features that are available in a released version of Amanda. This time, I want to share a project I'm working on right now - one that will be available in Amanda-3.2. I'm reworking the way Amanda writes its data to tape (or any other kind of storage) to make it more efficient, more reliable, and simpler to configure.

Historically, Amanda's conservative approach to finicky tape hardware has meant that it wasted some space at the end of each tape. With the changes I'm working on, Amanda will no longer waste this space, and can also avoid some needless copying of data in most cases, with a minimum of additional risk.

It's been a while since I've posted about recent development in Amanda, but it's not for lack of interesting topics!

Today I want to talk a little bit about Amanda's development. Historically, Amanda has always had a small, core group of developers who do the lion's share of the development work. There are probably lots of reasons for this, not least of which is that a backup application isn't the sexiest project on which to spend your spare time. But I think there's a deeper reason, and it has to do with hackability.