On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 05:05:54PM -0800, Steve Simitzis wrote:
> out of curiosity, i've seen several references to this amanda system
> on the coda list. does it offer significant advantages to the built-in
> coda backup system? it just seems unusual that the maintainers of a
> project use something other their own system to perform a task. :)

Well, inventing your own wheels is ofcourse always a nice challenge. But
there are plenty of challenges, and being able to integrate with other
(already deployed) systems seems to be a better policy and the required
changes make the system as a whole more flexible.

The Coda backup scripts are nice for a small setup, but once you scale
beyond several hundred volumes it becomes a nightmare to decide which
volumes need to be backed up on what days of the week etc. And the
fixed weekly schedule is limiting. Some of our volumes hold data that
never changes and performing a monthly full dump is more than sufficient.

Eventually I want to be able to easily drop in different authentication
mechanisms, like we currently have kerberos, we might want X509
certificates, or pgp/gpg keys, or rely on someone's ssh identity.

Same for the user/group administration. If we could use LDAP, MySQL or
DCE to store Coda users and group membership, then if someone else
builds a nice user administration interface we can leverage off that
work. It would be very useful to allow users to manage their own
groups, similar to AFS's pts tool.

Maybe at some point Coda just becomes a smart way of pulling other
technologies together, although I don't yet know what could replace the
Coda client ;)

Jan