Amanda – Installing The Amanda Client V3.2.1 On CentOS 5.5

Amanda – Installing The Amanda Client V3.2.1 On CentOS 5.5

Introduction

Amanda (The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) is a free backup solution which provides a centralised network backup server that can be used to back up multiple clients to disk or tape.

This article describes how to configure a CentOS 5.5 machine as  an Amanda Backup Client machine.

Pre-Requisites

  • A base installation of CentOS 5.5
  • Xinetd installed and configured on the server
  • A copy of the Amanda Version 3.2.1 Source Tarball
  • Gd installed on the server
  • Gnuplot installed on the server

Create The Amanda User

Prior to compiling and installing the Amanda server the amanda user needs to be created on the system.  To create the user and configure its home folder perform the following steps :-

  • In the command prompt execute the following commands

useradd -d /var/lib/amanda -s /bin/bash -G disk amanda 

chown amanda:disk /var/lib/amanda 

chmod 700 /var/lib/amanda

Compiling And Installing Amanda

The compilation of Amanda on the server required several options to be added in order to correctly build it for the environment and below is a copy of the command line used with explanations of the options afterwards :-

./configure –with-user=amanda –with-group=disk –without-server –with-bsdtcp-security

–with-user=amanda – Specifies the username that Amanda will use

–with-group=disk – Specifies the group that Amanda will use

–without-server – Specifies that you only wish to install the client components on the machine

–with-bsdtcp-security – Specifies that the server should use bsdtcp security to talk to clients (This is used as the Windows Client uses bsdtcp security only)

To compile and install Admanda on the server perform the following steps :-

  • In the command prompt execute the commands below

./configure (With the relevant options for your environment)

make 

make install

Configure The Amanda Xinetd Service

Once the software has finished installing the next step is to configure the Amanda xinetd Service.  To configure the Amanda xinetd service perform the following steps :-

  • Copy the example file /usr/local/share/amanda/examples/xinetd.amandaclient to /etc/xinetd.d/amandaclient
  • Edit the file and change the username from amandabackup to amanda
  • Save and exit the file
  • Configure the xinetd service to start at boot time execute chkconfig xinetd on
  • Start the xinetd service by executing service xinetd start

Grant Access To The Backup Server

The next step in the configuration of the Amanda Client on a CentOS server is to grant access to the Backup Server.  To grant access to the Backup Server perform the following steps :-

  • Edit the file /var/lib/amanda/.amandahosts and add the following line :-

backupserver.domain.com amanda

  • Save and exit the file
  • Grant access to only the Amanda user by executing the following command :-

chmod 700 /var/lib/amanda/.amandahosts

  • Edit the file /etc/hosts file and add a line for the backup server using its FQDN the following line :-

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx   backupserver.domain.com amanda

  • Save and exit the file

Create Remaining Folders And Set Permissions

The last part of setting up Amanda to run correctly on the server is to create the folders below which it uses for storing information on the hosts backed up :-

  • To create the remaining folders which are required execute the following commands in the command prompt whilst logged in as the amanda user :-

mkdir /var/lib/amanda/gnutar-lists