Amahi Forums

Got my system running, and now trying out all the features.

Attempting to do a full metal backup of my laptop - Boots up ok using PXW. I see all the boot files come up, and its obviously
connecting to my hda ok.
But it stops at 'Insert#'
No idea what this means, and been unable to find out from the PBA site either.
Anyone have any ideas ?

Clive

I think the same thing happened to me before, I think what you need to do is reinstall PBA, however i dont remember the command to do so, CPG will know

when this happens, it means that insert (the mini-distro inside PBA, which is showing it's age), does not support your hardware well.

it could be that your hardware is too old or too new.

you can download SystemRescueCD and boot from there, then follow the directions in http://pba, which should be as follows:

Same problem here. Client is a Gigabyte EX38-DS4 mobo with a built-in Realtek gigabit LAN. Stalls out at "insert#" when booting from LAN. Grrr.

i feel your pain.

once we have the brand new installer we're working on at the moment, we will be able to put a newer distro inside PBA that supports new hardware.

it's definitely showing it's teeth.

try the sysrescuecd in the mean time ...

I'm getting the following error:

gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar:Error exit delayed from previous errors

Anyone?

Pat

Resolved: Syntax error.

Thanks

Pat

I've got 2 issues with 2 different machines:
1 is a Lenovo laptop (about 8 months old) which also doesn't go any further than the "insert #" prompt.
the second is my PC, it tries to boot to the backup environment but it gives me an error that it cannot find the iso file to boot in /var/hda/apps/pba/client/iso and asks me for an alternative location for the media (CDROM).

exact error: (I've x-ed my internal IP address) I've also modified the permissions of the /var/hda/apps/pba/client and subdirs from root to apache (the user that owns all the other files), but no help. (maybe SELinux is getting in the way?)

This is a clean install of amahi on fedora 9 64bit, setup exactly as explained in the howto.

interesting.

we only support 64b on a "best effort" basis. maybe this is a 64-bit issue.

in the /var/log/messages file for your HDA, there must be a reason listed why the mount failed.

also, please verify that the /etc/exports file contains these lines:
note that you can also use other distros to boot, then use PBA, if the insert# mini-distro does not do it for you.

you should be able to see a page in your hda like this: http://pba

with information on how to do it.

First off: I understand 64 bit is on best effort, but why? 64bit Linux for x86_64 was introduced about 6 or 7 years ago, nearly all CPU's support 64 bit atm (save a few old/cheap Celerons and Semprons) so I see no point in not supporting it, especially for a server-oriented application. That said, I applaud your efforts regardless of my own personal view and I think Amahi has a lot to offer.

I've checked /etc/exports, the lines you mentioned are there.

I've also tried the alternate pba backup (SystemrescueCD), and the first time it worked out of the box, but later on I got into 22 errors... there were no permission issues, but the primary disk was full because I only mounted /var/hda/files on the 690GB LV instead of mounting /var/hda there completely grrrr... So I got to learn something new about the hda: it puts all your files in /var/hda/files, but the backups will be done to /var/hda/apps/pba/... which might or might not be on the same disk/partition.

I don't know how much work it is, but it seems better to me to have hda not residing in /var but in a filesystem that tends to be less critical, especially if you need to setup your own disk schemes - like "make sure you have a large partition available and mount it as /hda (or /amahi or whatever). This space will be used for storing your files and backups." /var is not a place I'd choose to have a lot of user files to be placed, when this mountpoint is full you will have no mail, no logging, no database, no printing etc. available anymore.
/home would be an excellent place to have the /hda subdir(s) in if a seperate mountpoint is not possible, if need be you could have a separate hda user account with the same primary gid as apache. It also saves you a lot of hassle in the long run: you don't have to assign a uid:gid in /etc/fstab to a mountpoint anymore, since the /home permissions take care of that. Also for adding a new disks to your system, a lot can be found for /home (add disk, login as root, fdisk & mkfs new disk, mount it as /home and add to fstab yadayada) but not for /var. Someone not so handy on the command line wouldn't be very likely to know that you can do that (or even cooler stuff if you have LVM enabled).