PPC Linux Clients

[aussant]

Are there any plans to port the current Linux client to the PPC based systems aswell as the existing x86 systems? I have a triple boot system (OS X, OS 9, Gentoo Linux) and would like to back up the entire system using Retrospect.

 

Booting the system in Gentoo Linux and then launching a OS X shell (using MacOnLinux) I'd like to be able to back up the Gentoo Linux partition using the familiar Retrospect software. I'm not sure if a common binary of the Linux client for PPC would support the various distributions of Linux that are available on the PPC architecture.

 

Dan

[murphyatgenome]

I second the motion for PPC Linux client support. We would like to port some of our PPC machines to Linux, and it would be convenient to have this feature. Unfortunately, I suspect this market might be rather small ....

 

[jslove]

I am very interested in a PPC linux client.

 

I have Retrospect Server 5.1 running on Mac OS X Server, with a service contract. It is primarily a file server for a bunch of clients running Mac OS X and Mac OS 9. I have two web servers serving web sites to the world, and they are running Debian Linux (woody) on a pair of G3/350 B&Ws, for which I am too cheap to buy additional Mac OS X Server licenses. I would really like to be able to run Retrospect Clients on those PPC Linux machines. Incremental backups would be much better than what I am doing now with huge tar files.

 

I have found PPC support on other distributions (e.g., SuSE) to lag disappointingly behind x86 support, but not with Debian. Maintaining upgrades and security updates is alarmingly simple, too. I don't think an audience for this would be as small as this thread would lead you to suppose.

 

-- Spencer

 

[sjnorton]

I'm a Linux newbie, so this is probably a silly question, but is there no way to use the Retrospect Linux clients on PPC machines? I've just installed Yellow Dog Linux on an old beige G3 to be a web server, and I would really like to include it in my existing Retrospect backup scheme. What alternatives do I have? TIA.

[natew]

Hi

 

Anything is worth a try but I doubt it will work. The linux client is designed for i386 architecture linux machines.

 

Thanks

Nate

[Gerk]

I will forth (heh, sorry for the pun but other ppc linux peeps might get it -- it's not a typo -- really) the nomination for a PPC backup client. There is a lot of PPC hardware out there running linux, and not all small potato workstations either . . . IBM pSeries comes to mind off the top of my head.

 

The i386 clients ones wont work for many reasons ... they are binaries compiled for a different architecture, there will be endiness issues (byte swap order) as x86 is little endian, where most other linux compatible processors (PPC, Sparc, ARM) are big endian. You _might_ be able to get it work with something like qemu on ppc, but it's not a good solution and chances are it wouldn't work as expected

 

For proper PPC support this would require dantz to recompile clients specifically on ppc (and likely make a lot of code changes to support the endianess stuff, etc). I use PPC linux boxen exclusively and right now the only real backup software option I have is Storix, but I would _love_ to have all my machines running retrospect and backing up to the same hardware.