Initial Building Without RPM

Setting Up A Test Build Area

As we mentioned above, the home FTP site for amanda is ftp.cs.umd.edu. The sources are in /pub/amanda.

After getting the sources, it's necessary to unpack them. We'll unpack them into RPM's SOURCES directory, so that we can keep all our work in one place:

# tar zxvf amanda-2.3.0.tar.gz amanda-2.3.0/ amanda-2.3.0/COPYRIGHT amanda-2.3.0/Makefile amanda-2.3.0/README … amanda-2.3.0/man/amtape.8 amanda-2.3.0/tools/ amanda-2.3.0/tools/munge …

As we saw, the sources unpacked into a directory called amanda-2.3.0. Let's rename that directory to amanda-2.3.0-orig, and unpack the sources again:

# ls total 177 drwxr-xr-x 11 adm games 1024 May 19 1996 amanda-2.3.0/ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 178646 Nov 20 10:42 amanda-2.3.0.tar.gz # mv amanda-2.3.0 amanda-2.3.0-orig # tar zxvf amanda-2.3.0.tar.gz amanda-2.3.0/ amanda-2.3.0/COPYRIGHT amanda-2.3.0/Makefile amanda-2.3.0/README … amanda-2.3.0/man/amtape.8 amanda-2.3.0/tools/ amanda-2.3.0/tools/munge # ls total 178 drwxr-xr-x 11 adm games 1024 May 19 1996 amanda-2.3.0/ drwxr-xr-x 11 adm games 1024 May 19 1996 amanda-2.3.0-orig/ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 178646 Nov 20 10:42 amanda-2.3.0.tar.gz #

Now why did we do that? The reason lies in the fact that we will undoubtedly need to make changes to the original sources in order to get amanda to build on Linux. We'll do all our hacking in the amanda-2.3.0 directory, and leave the amanda-2.3.0-orig untouched.

Since one of RPM's design features is to build packages from the original, unmodified sources, that means the changes we'll make will need to be kept as a set of patches. The amanda-2.3.0-orig directory will let us issue a simple recursive diff command to create our patches when the time comes.

Now that our sources are unpacked, it's time to work on building the software.

Getting Software to build

Looking at the docs/INSTALL file, we find that the steps required to get amanda configured and ready to build are actually fairly simple. The first step is to modify tools/munge to point to cpp, the C preprocessor.

Amanda uses CPP to create makefiles containing the appropriate configuration information. This approach is a bit unusual, but not unheard of. In munge, we find the following section:

# Customize CPP to point to your system's C preprocessor. # if cpp is on your path: CPP=cpp # if cpp is not on your path, try one of these: # CPP=/lib/cpp # traditional # CPP=/usr/lib/cpp # also traditional # CPP=/usr/ccs/lib/cpp # Solaris 2.x

Since cpp exists in /lib on Red Hat Linux, we need to change this part of munge to:

# Customize CPP to point to your system's C preprocessor. # if cpp is on your path: #CPP=cpp # if cpp is not on your path, try one of these: CPP=/lib/cpp # traditional # CPP=/usr/lib/cpp # also traditional # CPP=/usr/ccs/lib/cpp # Solaris 2.x

Next, we need to take a look in config/ and create two files:

1. config.h — contains platform-specific configuration information

2. options.h — contains site-specific configuration information

There are a number of example config.h files for a number of different platforms. There is a Linux-specific version, so we copy that file to config.h and review it. After a few changes to reflect our Red Hat Linux Linux environment, it's ready. Now let's turn our attention to options.h.

In the case of options.h, there's only one example file called options.h-vanilla. As the name implies, this is a basic file that contains a series of #defines that configure amanda for a typical environment. We'll need to make a few changes:

• Define the paths to common utility programs.

• Keep the programs from being named with the suffix -2.3.0.

• Define the directories where the programs should be installed.

While the first change is pretty much standard fare for anyone used to building software, the last two changes are really due to RPM. With RPM, there's no need to name the programs with a version-specific name, as RPM can easily upgrade to a new version and even downgrade back, if the new version doesn't work as well. The default paths amanda uses segregate the files so that they can be easily maintained. With RPM, there's no need to do this, since every file installed by RPM gets written into the database. In addition, Red Hat Linux systems adhere to the File System Standard, so any package destined for Red Hat systems should really be FSSTND-compliant, too. Fortunately for us, amanda was written to make these types of changes easy. But even if we had to hack an installation script, RPM would pick up the changes as part of its patch handling.

We'll spare you the usual discovery of typos, incompatibilities, and the resulting rebuilds. After an undisclosed number of iterations, our config.h and options.h files are perfect. Amanda builds:

# make Making all in common-src make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/amanda-2.3.0/common-src' … make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/amanda-2.3.0/man' #

As we noted, amanda is constructed so that most of the time changes will only be necessary in tools/munge, and the two files in config. Our situation was no different — after all was said and done, that was all we needed to hack.

Installing and testing

As we all know, just because software builds doesn't mean that it's ready for prime-time. It's necessary to test it first. In order to test amanda, we need to install it. Amanda's makefile has an install target, so let's use that to get started. We'll also get a copy of the output, because we'll need that later:

# make install Making install in common-src … make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/amanda-2.3.0/client-src' Installing Amanda client-side programs: install -c -o bin amandad /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin sendsize /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin calcsize /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin sendbackup-dump /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin sendbackup-gnutar /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin runtar /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin selfcheck /usr/lib/amanda Setting permissions for setuid-root client programs: (cd /usr/lib/amanda ; chown root calcsize; chmod u+s calcsize) (cd /usr/lib/amanda ; chown root runtar; chmod u+s runtar) … Making install in server-src Installing Amanda libexec programs: install -c -o bin taper /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin dumper /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin driver /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin planner /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin reporter /usr/lib/amanda install -c -o bin getconf /usr/lib/amanda Setting permissions for setuid-root libexec programs: (cd /usr/lib/amanda ; chown root dumper; chmod u+s dumper) (cd /usr/lib/amanda ; chown root planner; chmod u+s planner) Installing Amanda user programs: install -c -o bin amrestore /usr/sbin install -c -o bin amadmin /usr/sbin install -c -o bin amflush /usr/sbin install -c -o bin amlabel /usr/sbin install -c -o bin amcheck /usr/sbin install -c -o bin amdump /usr/sbin install -c -o bin amcleanup /usr/sbin install -c -o bin amtape /usr/sbin Setting permissions for setuid-root user programs: (cd /usr/sbin ; chown root amcheck; chmod u+s amcheck) … Installing Amanda changer libexec programs: install -c -o bin chg-generic /usr/lib/amanda … Installing Amanda man pages: install -c -o bin amanda.8 /usr/man/man8 install -c -o bin amadmin.8 /usr/man/man8 install -c -o bin amcheck.8 /usr/man/man8 install -c -o bin amcleanup.8 /usr/man/man8 install -c -o bin amdump.8 /usr/man/man8 install -c -o bin amflush.8 /usr/man/man8 install -c -o bin amlabel.8 /usr/man/man8 install -c -o bin amrestore.8 /usr/man/man8 install -c -o bin amtape.8 /usr/man/man8 … #

OK, no major problems there. Amanda does require a bit of additional effort to get everything running, though. Looking at docs/INSTALL, we follow the steps to get amanda running on our test system, as both a client and a server. As we perform each step, we note it for future reference:

• For the client:

  1. Set up a ~/.rhosts file allowing the server to connect.

  2. Make the disk device files readable by the client.

  3. Make /etc/dumpdates readable and writeable by the client.

  4. Put an amanda entry in /etc/services.

  5. Put an amanda entry in /etc/inetd.conf.

  6. Issue a kill -HUP on inetd.

• For the server:

  1. Create a directory to hold the server configuration files.

  2. Modify the provided example configuration files to suit our site.

  3. Add crontab entries to run amanda nightly.

  4. Put an amanda entry in /etc/services.

Once everything is ready, we run a few tests. Everything performs flawlessly. [1] Looks like we've got a good build. Let's start getting RPM involved.