holland-discuss team mailing list archive

[Tim Soderstrom <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 14, 2011, at 4:19 AM, Andrew Garner wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Tim Soderstrom
> <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Curious as to thoughts here - what about a generic copy/tar plugin for Holland?
> 
> I would suggest instead a general "script/command" plugin. This would
> run an arbitrary provided command and fail if the command exits
> non-zero.   You can pass the directory to stash files via variable
> substitution, for example:
> 
>>>> from string import Template
>>>> cmd = Template('/bin/tar cvf -C /var/www/images . > ${backupdir}/my_images.tar.gz')
>>>> cmd.safe_substitute(backupdir='/var/spool/holland/custom/XXXX_YYYY/')
> '/bin/tar cvf -C /var/www/images . >
> /var/spool/holland/custom/XXXX_YYYY//my_images.tar.gz'
> 
> Then just run that and check the exit status.  There's probably
> various other substitutions that may be useful.

Ah good point! I think I may play around with my current solution first just because I want to fiddle with Python's tar but, yes, that's actually a good plugin to have! That would also be quite useful to Holland and maybe help increase adaption rate too.

> With this, you could use rsync or many other archiving tools as you'd
> like.  Many simple use cases would fit into this plugin as well, like
> just running slapcat and redirecting its output.  You might not need
> an ldap plugin at all.
> 
> I would probably support using a specific shell (but default to
> /bin/sh).   You'll want to deal with the command's stdout/stderr -
> probably redirecting that to some location in the backup directory.

I might need some explanation on that. Would I not be able to use subprocess here and simply grab the output and funnel it into the Holland log?

> Estimating the size can be done in various ways - I would probably
> just initially punt on this (estimated_size = 1).   There are many
> ways it might be implemented, however.

Hmm...maybe there could be an option in the config to specify a directory and, if undefined, then simply set it to 0 or 1. Most of the solutions I could think of off-hand would be backing up files from somewhere making simply scanning a directory housing the contents, while wildly inaccurate, still better than a punt. At least that way the hope is that the directory estimate would be larger than the file backup size, adding a buffer (which can be adjusted with the size factor anyway).