Planet Ergo

Today was the first day of the Administration Course 1 for Bacula, by Bacula Systems. I am here sponsored by the distributor in the Netherlands, Amaziq Source, as a "thank you" for creating two sales leads which where followed up by Bacula Systems and Amaziq Source, and solidified -with two of my former Operator Groep Delft customers.

One of my former customers was using Commvault, which apparently turns out to be a big dissappointment when you decide to upgrade your backup environment. It seems Commvault only sells you the new, expensive license if you also purchase a number of days of expensive consultancy along with it. At these times, I can only grin, from ear to ear.

The other customer had decided on its own to move away from their existing Symantec backup suite, partly because it Just Didn't WorkTM, and partly because of the attractiveness of Open Source. Either way, when I worked at the customer site -on a job that had really nothing to do with backup- we were informally discussing the backup solution they were looking at at that time, and they let me know it was Zmanda. When I told them Zmanda is not(1) Open Source(2), even though they love to pretend to be, I got to explain why not (just try to download the source and you'll see for yourself) and most importantly, I got to mention an alternative. Enter Bacula, which they've now purchased a support subscription for with Bacula Systems.

Back to the original topic of this blog post, the course itself, to me at least didn't seem very advanced, since I've been occasionally operating Bacula for a number of years. I have to say that was just the first day though, and tomorrow is promosing to be way more challenging (I think the actual word used was "boggling"). I realize though the average system administrator used to any other type of Backup & Recovery software may require this course to get used to the different terminology used within Bacula, as it is not your average click-and-pray type of program.

Even in my case though, the course helps in creating a correct understanding of the features and configuration of Bacula, and as such helps me to futher increase my knowledge of Bacula. Even more so, since this course is being mentored by the original author of Bacula; Kern Sibbald. This man, for whom I've got much respect, has been working at Bacula for over 8 years already. It's one of the main reason why I'm in this course in lovely Switzerland; I might as well have followed the course in the Netherlands but I wanted to meet more of the Bacula people, Mr. Sibbald in particular.

We learned about the architecture of Bacula, which of course I thought I was pretty much familiar with already, but I did get to hear some more, new details on how in greater environments, multiple Directors, Catalogs and Storage Daemons can be aligned and balanced out -and some more details I all wrote down in the handout.

After the initial "overview", we went into the feature and configuration details of Bacula, merely scratching the surface of each configuration directive of each component. I got some things that were on my mind cleared up, as I've been working with all kinds of different backup suites throughout my carreer with Operator Groep Delft... ;-)

I can't wait 'till tomorrow, but first: dinner and drinks