Table of Contents
by Doug Kingston, 30 January 2003. Based on Cygwin 1.3.18, and Amanda 2.4.3-20021027 and some fixes which will be in the official release by the time you see this.
With thanks to Enrico Bernardini from whom I have borrowed some material from an earlier attempt at documenting the installation of Amanda on Cygwin in 2001. Please send annotations and corrections to mailto://[email protected]. I can be reached as dpk (at) randomnotes.org (do the obvious).
The following Cygwin packages are required for binary installation (may be incomplete):
Category BASE: standard
Category MISC: gzip
Category MISC: tar
Category NET: inetutils
You need also these packages to build from source (may be incomplete):
Category DEVELOP: ALL
Category INTERPRETERS: m4, gawk ?
Category LIBS:default selection? (libc, libiconv, others?)
I have most or the basic utilities and libraries installed so I cannot give you a more specific list of what is required. If someone has a more definitive list, I would appreciate and email to mailto://[email protected].
One user reported some problems with access rights when running under Cygwin, which he solved by setting the CYGWIN environment variable to nontsec. I do not believe this is necessary if you run the Amanda daemon as System (see below).
When doing backups on a NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP system, the choice of
user and group will be important if you are to properly interact with the
security mechanisms of these more modern Microsoft product. For Windows 95/98/
ME this is probably a non-issue. The most privileged account on the Windows
systems is 'System', and I have chosen to use this account for Amanda backups
to ensure that I can access the widest set of files. On Unix we would run as
root, with equivalent access permissions. I have also chose to run under the
'Administrators' group, another standard Windows group. Ensure these exist
before you continue - or identify another account to use. The Cygwin
installation postinstall script should have already populated
/etc/passwd and
etc/group with these entries.
Make sure that System (or SYSTEM) has a home directory specified in /etc/passwd.
I used _/home/root_. You'll need to put the file .amandahosts here later. The
relevant lines from my file /etc/passwd are:
SYSTEM:*:18:18:,S-1-5-18:/home/root: root:*:18:18:,S-1-5-18:/home/root:
After installing Cygwin, unpack the Amanda sources, typically in
/usr/src/Amanda
or something similar. In the Amanda directory, you will need to
execute:
automake # this may not be necessary in the official release autoconf # this may not be necessary in the official release ./configure --without-server \ --without-force-uid \ --with-user=yourlogin \ --with-group=Administrators make make # yes, I needed to run it a second time make install
The use of your own login instead of SYSTEM requires some explanation. If you
were to call runconfigure with SYSTEM instead of your own login id as part of
the -with-user parameter, the installation process will fail due to the way
Cygwin and the NT/W2K/XP security system interact. Once you chown a file to
another user (like SYSTEM) you are no longer able to chgrp or chmod the file.
The installation process will abort at this point. By installing the files
owned by yourself, you will be able to chgrp and chmod them as expected. Note
that you still RUN as SYSTEM from /etc/inetd.conf (see below).
You have to modify some config files:
/etc/inetd.conf: cleanup un-needed entries:
Comment out any entries you do not need by placing a '#' at the start of the
lines. This is just good practice, and if any of the entries reference non-
existent users (e.g. uucp) inetd may not start up.
/etc/inetd.conf: add
amanda dgram udp wait System /usr/local/libexec/amandad amandad ATTENTION: Use tabs, don't use spaces.
create _/home/root/.amandahosts_ (or whereever System's home directory is): <amanda server> <amanda user>
Then create the following Amanda directories and the file amandates:
mkdir -p /usr/local/var/amanda/gnutar-lists
mkdir /tmp/amanda
touch /etc/amandates Update the Windows services list
WINDIR\Services: add
amanda 10080/udp # Amanda backup services
amandaidx 10082/tcp # Amanda backup services
amidxtape 10083/tcp # Amanda backup services
where WINDIR is C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc or something similar. The last
two lines are needed if you want to use amrecover.
Ensure that the default Windows PATH environment variable include your Cygwin /
bin directory. This is necessary since inetd and hence the amandad that it
spawns will not have the advantage of being started by the standard bash shell
startup script and won't find the needed dynamic libraries (e.g. cygwin1.dll).
My PATH is:
_%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;C:\cygwin\bin_
This is on XP; My Computer, right click Properties, click on Environment Variables (at the bottom). Yours may vary, but make sure the Cygwin bin directory is represented somewhere in the PATH.
If you want to test your installation, you can call inetd from bash prompt:
/usr/sbin/inetd -d
To start after the user logs in: Create a shortcut to
c:\cygwin\usr\sbin\inetd.exe
in
WINDIR\start menu\programs\startup
To start before the user logs in: Add the string key
CygwinInetd=C:\cygwin\usr\sbin\inetd.exe
under
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServices
in the registry. You'll see a dos-like window on the startup: I did not find a solution to iconize or to make invisible (suggestions are welcome).
From bash prompt, type:
/usr/sbin/inetd --install-as-service
Then, to start/stop the inetd service use the Services control panel or the following Windows command:
net start/stop inetd
Currently, client side compression does not work, probably due to problems in
pipe emulation in Cygwin. I have not tried to debug this yet. This may be
addressed in a subsequent release, or it could be fixed in later releases of
Cygwin. Due to this issue, we recommend that if you want compressed dumps from
Windows clients, you configure Amanda for server compression in amanda.conf on
your Amanda server:
define dumptype srv-comp-tar {
global
comment "partitions dumped via tar with server compression"
program "GNUTAR"
compress server fast
exclude list ".Amanda.exclude"
}A note on exclude lists is also in order. If you specify a relative path, it will be expected that the file is in or relative to the root of the directory you are planning to dump. Typically this will not be '/' but '/cygdrive/c' or something similar if you want to get the Windows files and the Cygwin files. '/' is taken to be the root of the Cygwin tree, normally something like C: \cygwin or possibly C:\Program Files\cygwin.