Cosmos is beta software currently being developed by ????. It came to my attention when they offered a single system permanent license to AUUG members who helped evaluate the package. Being interested in Enterprise Backup Systems, I enquired. Eventually a URL for download and a temporary license arrived by email.
Download was fine and easy as it is only 4.2Mb in a tgz file. There were no problems on installation except a bit of confusion as to what constituted the licence number. They admitted a bit of confusion in their instructions and we were away.
Installation is in two parts; COS Manager and then COS backup. If you do not have a general unix background, you might face a bit of confusion as to options to choose. Hint - take the general, non-OS specific choices for Linux. A bit of looking around solved any questions I had as a few things are not so obvious at first glance.
I guess I'd have to rate the installation as easy as I didn't have to read any manuals to do the configuration and installation. Along the way, I made a few notes of the problems I encountered and some general comments.
Date format is only a choice of European (dd/mm/yyyy) or US (mm/dd/yyyy). ISO (yyyymmdd) would have been my preferred option.
Cosmos comes from people of a unix background and they install everything from a generic unix viewpoint, even though they claim it is designed for RedHat Linux. Hmm, perhaps they should exame the cron queueing under RedHat Linux as the installation knows nothing about how RedHat have set up cron.
It also seems that Cosmos doesn't know about logrotate under Linux either as it sets up another process to take care of "log auditing", which it explains is about making sure that log files do not gt too big. Yep, this is logrotate in my books.
Cosmos sets itself up under the user and group Cosmos, but that is only for initial installation (carried out by root) and configuration. Once the inital config is done, designated users can run and/or manage Cosmos. Forget to set up a user prior? - well Cosmos installation does that by directly editing the /etc/user and /etc/hosts file.
One day, I'll learn to write slower and clearer and thus be able to read my notes easily. I'll add this point in when I decipher my notes.
When defining your backup media, Cosmos only knows about 60 and 90 metre DAT tapes. It doesn't know about 120 and 125 metre DAT tapes.It also ties a drive to a size of tape, so each drive is seen as only being able to handle one size of tape. According to ????, the work around for this limitation is just to define virtual drive that all access the same physical device.
Cosmos does have one very nice feature. When it finds the tape in the drive is not the expected one, it asks would you like the requested label applied to this tape. This save the loasome task of having to apply the electronic label as a separate activity on new and reused tapes.
A big grumble was that help was not contectutal and you face the tradition collection of unrelated waffle that has to be waded through whilst you guess the jargon used in this applications help manual. ???? advise that right mouse click contectual help is being considered.
I stand to be corrected, but I could not find a files exclusion facility.
Activity wise, Cosmos has been pathetic. The first backup died on a scsi tape device error. Subsequent attempt to kick off an interactive backup have all failed to proceed. It seems the requests don't actually start. I'm currently awaiting a response from ???? on this.