[Bacula-users] Bacula Status

[Kern S. <ke...@si...>]

Hello,

I've been more or less "gone" for the last two to three weeks doing intensive 
debugging and algorithm enhancing in Bacula, so have not been active on the 
email lists.  For the most part, the heavy debugging is now complete.  Here 
is a brief summary of how version 2.1.10 has progressed to where it is today.

- Fought two kernel bugs, one that rendered gdb useless.
- Had two UPS batteries go dead.
- Knocked several old bugs in the PostgreSQL driver that clobbered memory, and
  caused seg faults.  Several of these bugs appeared in only one in 20 
  executions of a particular regression script -- hard to debug.
- Added several new algorithms to the multi-drive autochanger algorithm.
  Hopefully, most if not all of the past problems will now be behind us.
- Implement new reservations system debugging code that permits much
  easier detection of conflicts.
- Fought a lot with PostgreSQL (I won't go into the details here ...).
- Figured out how to speed up SQLite3 by 30 times (increases probability
  of database corruption on sudden power failures).
- Implemented new smartalloc double buffer free detection (trapped a
  PostgreSQL driver bug).
- A bunch of bug fixes (mostly old bugs).
- In the foray, it appears that code that I previously added to switch drives
  during restore now works, which means that Bacula can now restore data
  written to multiple devices (different MediaTypes).  This needs testing and
  confirmation.
- If the above code works well, it will mean that shortly, we can eliminate
  the need for Bacula to move tapes from one autochanger drive to another
  during backups ... :-)

While I was "gone", Dirk was also "gone" on vacation.  At least that is what 
he said -- however, during his vacation, he has added an impressive number of 
new features to bat :-)

I recommend that anyone who is using version 2.1.10 test version 2.1.12, which 
is now in the SVN.  Although it has undergone very extensive testing, a bit 
more is necessary to ensure that recent enhancements to the ./configure 
process have not broken something on Solaris or FreeBSD.

Unless something really unexpected turns up, I will be releasing 2.1.12 for 
BETA testing later this week.

Best regards,

Kern