Bacula 1.36 User's Guide
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Supported Systems and Hardware

System Requirements

  • Bacula has been compiled and run on Linux RedHat, FreeBSD, and Solaris systems.
  • It requires GNU C++ version 2.95 or higher to compile. You can try with other compilers and older versions, but you are on your own. We have successfully compiled and used Bacula on RH8.0/RH9/RHEL 3.0 with GCC 3.2. Note, in general GNU C++ is a separate package (e.g. RPM) from GNU C, so you need them both loaded. On RedHat systems, the C++ compiler is part of the gcc-c++ rpm package.
  • There are certain third party packages that Bacula needs. Except for MySQL and PostgreSQL, they can all be found in the depkgs and depkgs1 releases.
  • If you want to build the Win32 binaries, you will need a Microsoft Visual C++ compiler (or Visual Studio). Although all components build (console has some warnings), only the File daemon has been tested.
  • Bacula requires a good implementation of pthreads to work. This is not the case on some of the BSD systems.
  • The source code has been written with portability in mind and is mostly POSIX compatible. Thus porting to any POSIX compatible operating system should be relatively easy.
  • The GNOME Console program is developed and tested under GNOME 2.x. It also runs under GNOME 1.4 but this version is deprecated and thus no longer maintained.
  • The wxWidgets Console program is developed and tested with the latest stable version of wxWidgets (2.4.2). It works fine with the Windows and GTK+-1.x version of wxWidgets, and should also works on other platforms supported by wxWidgets.
  • The Tray Monitor program is developed for GTK+-2.x. It needs Gnome >=2.2, KDE >=3.1 or any window manager supporting the FreeDesktop system tray standard.
  • If you want to enable command line editing and history, you will need to have /usr/include/termcap.h and either the termcap or the ncurses library loaded (libtermcap-devel or ncurses-devel).

Supported Operating Systems

  • Linux systems (built and tested on RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0).
  • If you have a recent Red Hat Linux system running the 2.4.x kernel and you have the directory /lib/tls installed on your system (normally by default), bacula will NOT run. This is the new pthreads library and it is defective. You must remove this directory prior to running Bacula, or you can simply change the name to /lib/tls-broken) then you must reboot your machine (one of the few times Linux must be rebooted). If you are not able to remove/rename /lib/tls, an alternative is to set the environment variable "LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.19" prior to executing Bacula. For this option, you do not need to reboot, and all programs other than Bacula will continue to use /lib/tls.

    The feedback that we have for 2.6 kernels is that the same problem exists. However, on 2.6 kernels, we would probably recommend using the environment variable override (LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.19) rather than removing /lib/tls.

  • Most flavors of Linux (Gentoo, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, ...).
  • Solaris various versions.
  • FreeBSD (tape driver supported in 1.30 -- please see some important considerations in the Tape Modes on FreeBSD section of the Tape Testing chapter of this manual.)
  • Windows (Win98/Me, WinNT/2K/XP) Client (File daemon) binaries.
  • MacOS X/Darwin (see http://fink.sourceforge.net/ for obtaining the packages)
  • OpenBSD Client (File daemon).
  • Irix Client (File daemon).
  • Tru64
  • Bacula is said to work on other systems (AIX, BSDI, HPUX, ...) but we do not have first hand knowledge of these systems.
  • See the Porting Chapter of this manual for information on porting to other systems.

Supported Tape Drives

Even if your drive is on the list below, please check the Tape Testing Chapter of this manual for procedures that you can use to verify if your tape drive will work with Bacula. If your drive is in fixed block mode, it may appear to work with Bacula until you attempt to do a restore and Bacula wants to position the tape. You can be sure only by following the procedures suggested above and testing.

It is very difficult to supply a list of supported tape drives, or drives that are known to work with Bacula because of limited feedback (so if you use Bacula on a different drive, please let us know). Based on user feedback, the following drives are known to work with Bacula. A dash in a column means unknown:

OS Man. Media Model Capacity/th>
- ADIC DLT Adic Scalar 100 DLT 100GB
- ADIC DLT Adic Fastor 22 DLT -
- - DDS Compaq DDS 2,3,4 -
- Exabyte - Exabyte drives less than 10 years old -
- Exabyte - Exabyte VXA drives -
- HP Travan 4 Colorado T4000S -
- HP DLT HP DLT drives -
- HP LTO HP LTO Ultrium drives -
FreeBSD 4.10 RELEASE HP DAT HP StorageWorks DAT72i -
- Overland LTO LoaderXpress LTO -
- Overland - Neo2000 -
- OnStream - OnStream drives (see below) -
- Quantum DLT DLT-8000 40/80GB
Linux Seagate DDS-4 Scorpio 40 20/40GB
FreeBSD 4.9 STABLE Seagate DDS-4 STA2401LW 20/40GB
FreeBSD 5.2.1 pthreads patched RELEASE Seagate AIT-1 STA1701W 35/70GB
Linux Sony DDS-2,3,4 - 4-40GB
Linux Tandberg - Tandbert MLR3 -
FreeBSD Tandberg - Tandberg SLR6 -
Solaris Tandberg - Tandberg SLR75 -

There is a list of supported autochangers models in the autochangers chapter of this document, where you will find other tape drives that work with Bacula.

Unsupported Tape Drives

Previously OnStream IDE-SCSI tape drives did not work with Bacula. As of Bacula version 1.33 and the osst kernel driver version 0.9.14 or later, they now work. Please see the testing chapter as you must set a fixed block size.

QIC tapes are known to have a number of particularities (fixed block size, and one EOF rather than two to terminate the tape). As a consequence, you will need to take a lot of care in configuring them to make them work correctly with Bacula.

FreeBSD Users Be Aware!!!

Unless you have patched the pthreads library on most FreeBSD systems, you will lose data when Bacula spans tapes. This is because the unpatched pthreads library fails to return a warning status to Bacula that the end of the tape is near. Please see the Tape Testing Chapter of this manual for important information on how to configure your tape drive for compatibility with Bacula.

Supported Autochangers

For information on supported autochangers, please see the Autochangers Known to Work with Bacula section of the Autochangers chapter of this manual.


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Kern Sibbald and John Walker