Linux ADSM Mini-Howto

Introduction

ADSM is a network-based backup system, sold by IBM, in use at many organizations. There are clients for a large variety of systems (different UNIX brands, Windows, Novell, Mac, Windows NT). Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, there is no native Linux version.

You will have to use the SCO binary, and install the iBCS2-emulator for running ADSM. This description is for ADSM v2r1.

At the time if this writing, I am only aware of a version which works with the i386 version of Linux.

Installing the ADSM client

The SCO binary is supplied as three tar files, or disks. Change to the root directory, set your umask according to your policies, and unpack them from there (as root). In your Directory /tmp, you will find an installation script; execute that.

You will then have to hand-edit /usr/adsm/dsm.sys and /usr/adsm/dsm.opt. In dsm.sys, important lines to specify are:

Servername

The name of the server
TCPServeraddress

The fully qualified host name of the server
NODename

Your own hostname

In dsm.opt, you will have to specify

Server

As before
Followsymbolic

Wether or not to follow symbolic links (not a good idea, in general)
SUbdir

Wether to back up subdirectories (you usually want that)
domain

The file systems to back up

You will then have to create a SCO-compatible /etc/mnttab from your /etc/fstab. You can use the following Perl script, fstab2mnttab, for this.