remote retrospect clients using DHCP

[rmcken]

What is the 'best practice' method of configuring remote laptop clients that need to be backed up regularly (via their home broadband mostly- dhcp). It seems you can't configure the client with the static server address (which would be a logical method imho). I suppose you can subscribe to some reverse dns service, but that's one more app to manage. Configuring subnets in the Add Client window does not even work for our local subnets, never mind a home user broadband subnet. And even if it did who wants to track 50 different user's subnets? What are others doing in this situation? Thanks.

[Mayoff]

Can you be more specific about the configuration and what you are trying to do?

 

Are you in an office trying to backup laptops over the internet? If so, the performance is going to be REALLY bad in most cases. Most home users have very slow upload speeds, resulting in bad backup speeds.

 

Finding the clients should work if they use VPN and you configure subnet broadcast to your VPN subnet

[rmcken]

If you define exclusions carefully, skip the local email cache (we use IMAP) and have shared network space for large collaborative projects the data volume is manageable. And we do a full backup on site before they leave, so it's just incrementals. Case in point, I back up my laptop at home using a modem.

 

No VPN at the moment.

 

So I'm trying to find clients that are on an unknown subnet. I can install whatever is needed on the client.

 

I'm curious (as it seems to be a design decision and not a technical one), why wouldn't you allow storing the IP (or dns name) of the retro server somewhere locally, and have the client initiate first contact from wherever they may be?

[Mayoff]

I'm curious (as it seems to be a design decision and not a technical one), why wouldn't you allow storing the IP (or dns name) of the retro server somewhere locally, and have the client initiate first contact from wherever they may be?

 

This is on the feature request list, but isn't possible right now.

[rmcken]

It's been on the feature request list for many years now....

[MRIS]

I'm thinking that maybe HAMACHI could be used here.

 

It's basically a zero configuration VPN-like solution, that puts all participants of the same hamachi mini-network on the same IP subnet, thus allowing both the retrospect server and all the clients to be logically on the same network.

 

Basically install the hamachi program on each participant including the server, all join the same password-protected network and then you've got IP connectivity.

 

The free version should be enough to allow you to test the concept, but for an implementation for 50 clients you'd probably need to go the premium version.

 

https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/advantages.asp

[rmcken]

Thanks. We've been using a dynamic DNS client, which associates a DHCP address with a DNS name. Just one more thing to manage, which I don't need- same as hamachi. Backing up remote clients on the internet is not a stretch, I wish emc would figure that out.