On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 10:52:28AM +0100, Dr A V Le Blanc wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 04:06:14PM -0400, Jan Harkes wrote:
> > The restored volumes are actually restored backup volumes. i.e.
> > non-replicated and possibly read-only. That is why the recovery
> > instructions are to mount them in a temporary place and copy the stuff
> > out into newly created replicated volumes.
> 
> Ah, but copying volumes is awfully difficult, since (so far as I know)
> there are no programs that copy coda mount points and ACLs correctly.
> This means that restoring a large system accurately could take weeks
> of very tedious work.  (Find all mount points, record and remove,
> tar and untar in new locations, then for each directory use 'cfs la'
> to list ACLs, and manually use 'cfs sa' to set corresponding ACLs
> on the other directory (since coda's cfs doesn't support 'cfs ca'),
> then restore all the mount points in the recovered volume and repeat
> the same process).

Yes, at some point I had looked at afio which has the ability to run
additional scripts that could grab a summary of all ACL's and then
restore the ACL's while copying. Mountpoint could be done in a similar
fashion.

But it would be 100x simpler if there is a way of twiddling the flags in
a volume header (using volutil or something).

> But the net result of all of this appears to be that coda has no
> facilities at present for restoring volumes from backups, though it
> can produce a readonly copy of what was backed up, from which an
> administrator can manually reconstruct the data.  Is this correct?
> And there is no easy way to move a volume, rename a volume, convert
> a volume with all its mount points and ACLs from non-replicated to
> replicated, or conversely?

Correct, I am afraid that the administration and maintenance
functionality has not been as interesting as f.i. disconnected operation
or replication. I believe that at this moment we actually need to have
this kind of functionality to make the system as a whole more usable.

I already started sniffing through the code last night. But found no
quick and easy solutions yet.

Jan