A Free Home Network Backup System using Solaris!<BR><BR>

We're back again today.  This time to talk about how you can save
between $400 and $5000 US dollars using Solaris Intel to create a home
network data backup system for windows, linux and Solaris. In fact,
this same configuration would make an excellent choice for a small
business network.<BR><BR>

Solaris 8 Update 3 (01/2001 update) ships with a companion CDROM
containing a large array of free software.  Among the items found on
that CDROM are;<BR><BR>

* Samba  - A better NT file server than NT!<BR>
* cdrecord - A program for burning CDROMs<BR>

Those 2 programs will form the backbone of a fine network data backup
system without any commercial software.<BR><BR>

The mkisofs program in Solaris makes it simple to create a cdrom image
file from any Solaris directory containing your data and programs.  The
GNU tar program also makes it simple to back up all your local files to
a tape drive.  But what about the rest of your windows98, linux, or
other unix machines on your home network?  How do you back up all those
email, document, and data files?  When we last looked at commercial
backup programs for small system use, they ranged in price from $400 to
$5000 if you wanted network backup for several windows, linux, and
Solaris systems.  This was too much to swallow for the average home
user who has several windows machines sharing the internet connection,
and possibly a Solaris x86 and/or Linux box for a small server.  Well
it turns out that all the software and technology you need for doing
this is included free of charge in the Solaris media kit.<BR><BR>

The "samba" program provided on the Companion CD runs on your Solaris
box to make it behave as a high reliability NT file server using the
SMB protocol that Microsoft systems use for Network Neighborhood and
file sharing.  Samba can both "share" directories on your Solaris
system so that Windows computers can see those directories in Network
Neighborhood, and also can permit your Solaris system to "mount" shared
folders and disks on your various Windows computers.  All of this adds
up to simple file transfer between all your Solaris, Windows, and even
Linux computers on your home network.  Data Backup becomes a simple
task now!<BR><BR>

Once you have shared the disks and folders of your windows systems, and
configured Samba on your Solaris system, you can use a simple script to
attach to the remote windows computers (using the smbmount command),
and then back up all of the computers on the net with one local solaris
command such as tar or cpio.  I recommend GNU tar since it has
significantly enhanced features for doing these backups.<BR><BR>

Once the tar command has backed up all the remote data onto one local
file on your solaris hard disk, you can then use the cdrecord command
to burn CDROMs of your data.  If your backup size is large, simply
attach a Sun tape drive of your choice, or almost any other commercial
tape drive, and dump all the systems backup up to your tape.<BR><BR>

For final automation, your backup script can be run from the Solaris
scheduling tool called cron.  In fact, Michael O'Brien has written an
excellent example article on setting up a home backup system like
this.  His article is titled "A Linux-Based Automatic Backup System",
when in fact the process in the article works the same way on Solaris.
Michael's choice for the example was Linux.<BR><BR>
<A HREF="http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue80/4360.html">http://www2.linuxjournal.com/lj-issues/issue80/4360.html</A>

Information on using and configuring Samba can be found<BR>
<A HREF="http://www.samba.org/">http://www.samba.org/</A>
<BR><BR>

Information on obtaining Solaris 8 can be found at<BR>
<A HREF="http://www.sun.com/solaris">http://www.sun.com/solaris</A>
<BR><BR>
Information on downloading Solaris 8 can be found at<BR>
<A HREF="http://www.sun.com/solaris/binaries/">http://www.sun.com/solaris/binaries/</A>
<BR><BR>