Thursday, April 28, 2016

Installing the Bareos server

Some background is needed before setting up the Bareos server. The Bareos backup system is based on the Bacula backup system. It consists of  a Director (the central component),  a file system agent and a storage agent. If this is the first time installation, install the backup system components on the same server for testing purposes. The installation process is divided into three stages.

  1. Setting up the Bareos repository
  2. Installing in the programs 
  3. Setting up or configuring the system
A. Setting up the repository
  1. Refer to quickstart information in official documentation for your Distro specific instruction
  2. For RedHat, it's basically
    1. add the Bareos yum repository. The repositories are here. Make sure the client version matches the Bareos server version. Choose the version of RedHat or CentOS for the target server. Download the bareos.repo file to /etc/yum.repos.d
    2. do a yum check-update to update the repositories to load them
  3. For Oracle Linux, enable the Optional Latest repository.
  4. The latest verions requires the EPEL repository to be added also.
B. Installing the application
This requires a decision on the choice of database to use. Both MariaDB/MySQL and PostgeSQL are offered as option. Install bareos together with the choice of back-end. Using the example below will also install other necessary components. However, the database of choice must be installed first. For RedHat users using MariaDB/MySQL,

yum install bareos bareos-database-mysql bareos-webui

C. Configuring the system
After the program/application files are installed, the database has to be configured. A Bareos database has to be created, the tables within the Bareos database have to be made and the correct privileges assigned.  If this is a fresh server, install  mysql withe the following command

yum install mysql mysql-server
or
yum install mariadb-server

And then start mysql with the command: service mysqld start.

Bareos provides the script files to create the tables necessary. For MySQL/MariaDB the commands are
 
/usr/lib/bareos/scripts/create_bareos_database 
/usr/lib/bareos/scripts/make_bareos_tables 
/usr/lib/bareos/scripts/grant_bareos_privileges

Run these from a privileged or root account. If the database has just been installed, the commands would run without a problem. However, running a system without passwords is dangerous. After testing, secure this by following these instructions.

If your are using MySQL Community Edition version 8 and above, additional steps are required. You must run mysql_secure_installation to set the new root password. Create a ~/.my.cnf file in the root directory. And then run the 3 scripts above. Granting privileges  may cause additional errors if your password validation is set. Set the password in the file /etc/bareos/bareos-dir.d/catalog/MyCatalog.conf.

After configuring MySQL for Bareos, start the Bareos components to start the system
service bareos-dir start
service bareos-fd start
service bareos-sd start

Thankfully, the default installation will not only install the Director, File Daemon (agent) and Storage Daemon but also a working configuration.You can follow the instructions at the official bareos installation to do a sample test.

 If you have a different distribution or an existing server setup, refer to the Bareos installation documentation for more information and options. 

Reference
https://www.svennd.be/installing-bareos-on-centos-7/

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Installing the Alfresco Document Management system

Alfresco is a document management system that has been around for a while. It has a decent community edition that is clearly geared to push a business using it to use the Enterprise Edition. For small businesses however, it will take a long time to reach that point. It can be also extended with add-ons of varying quality.

Setup is really easy. Techmint has a great how to on how to setup Alfresco together with the Ngnix web server. The instructions are meant to be executed on a dedicated server or a freshly installed server. So preparation for Alfresco itself is minimal. The instructions are clear, explaining what the commands are for as well as showing them. This is great for installing on other Linux distributions because the commands for doing certain actions would be different. Knowing what the command does allows it to be easily replaced. The only known issue is with downloading Alfresco community edition itself. The download speed can be slow and break off. That is why the HOWTO covers that too, using wget to download the installer file. Overall, if a basic document management system is the requirement, Alfresco is the case.