Bug 1460763

I'm thinking we should just not ship amserverconfig at all.  I've never used it but obviously it's going to have to be heavily patched to not refer to things like xinetd.  I'm not sure if it can actually perform any useful function that isn't already done when you install the package.

@Ivor, xinetd configuration is completely irrelevant.  It's unneeded in Fedora since systemd does all of that.  If you really want to configure it via xinetd for some reason, you are way outside the bounds of what the as-packaged version is intended to support.

Oh, hmm, amserverconfig doesn't actually do anything with xinetd; it just prints that one message:

sub check_xinetd{
    &mprint ("/var/lib/amanda/example/xinetd.amandaserver contains the latest Amanda server daemon configuration.\n");
    &mprint ("Please merge it to /etc/xinetd.d/amandaserver.\n");
}

So, uh, I'll patch amserverconfig to not call check_xinetd.  I don't see any reason to patch the useless xinetd example files, since they're useless and that would be just one more patch to maintain.  @Josef: What do you think?

I have no interest in using xinetd! I just followed the instructions from amaddclient and amandaserverconfig from the Zmanda quick-start guide!

After I removed the xinetd files and restarted that service, Amanda reported "Connection refused". With a little Google help I found what I needed to start/enable is "amanda.socket" not the non-existent "amanda.service" that I had expected.

I hope this helps other Amanda newbies. What did I miss in the normal course of installing the Amanda packages to become this confused?

I can't say what you missed, but various guides on the Internet will almost always miss out on distro-specific information.

Unfortunately I've been using Amanda since the 90s and Unix/Unix-like operating systems since the 80s so it's simply not possible for me personally to see things from the perspective of a beginner.  Plus the two utilities you ran didn't exist at all way back then.  I simply did not have the questions to which you needed to find the answers.

We could put Fedora-related documentation (like the proper way to actually enable the socket-activated service) in a README.Fedora file in the package.  Can you think of what content might have been useful to you which would be appropriate to place in such a file?

I went ahead and pushed a patch (to rawhide) to remove mention of xinetd from the amserverconfig output and did a build.  I'm not sure it's worth updating stable releases just for this, but the patch would come in with any later updates that we make.

(In reply to Jason Tibbitts from comment #2)
> Oh, hmm, amserverconfig doesn't actually do anything with xinetd; it just
> prints that one message:
> 
> sub check_xinetd{
>     &mprint ("/var/lib/amanda/example/xinetd.amandaserver contains the
> latest Amanda server daemon configuration.\n");
>     &mprint ("Please merge it to /etc/xinetd.d/amandaserver.\n");
> }
> 
> So, uh, I'll patch amserverconfig to not call check_xinetd.  I don't see any
> reason to patch the useless xinetd example files, since they're useless and
> that would be just one more patch to maintain.  @Josef: What do you think?

Hi Jason,

sorry for late answer, 
I agree with your solution. It isn't necessary to create new build for it, but keep it in rawhide and when some other bugs/rebase comes for amanda, this will be applied for other fedora releases.

(In reply to Jason Tibbitts from comment #4)
> I can't say what you missed, but various guides on the Internet will almost
> always miss out on distro-specific information.
> 
> Unfortunately I've been using Amanda since the 90s and Unix/Unix-like
> operating systems since the 80s so it's simply not possible for me
> personally to see things from the perspective of a beginner.  Plus the two
> utilities you ran didn't exist at all way back then.  I simply did not have
> the questions to which you needed to find the answers.
> 
> We could put Fedora-related documentation (like the proper way to actually
> enable the socket-activated service) in a README.Fedora file in the package.
> Can you think of what content might have been useful to you which would be
> appropriate to place in such a file?
> 
> I went ahead and pushed a patch (to rawhide) to remove mention of xinetd
> from the amserverconfig output and did a build.  I'm not sure it's worth
> updating stable releases just for this, but the patch would come in with any
> later updates that we make.

The documentation that would have saved me from this rabbit hole would have been for amandaserverconfig and amaddclient to finish with a message like:

  "Use 'systemctl start amanda.socket' and 'systemctl enable amanda.socket' to enable Amanda on the server."

(possibly duplicated in a README.Fedora, but in which directory?) in place of the xinetd message. Since I didn't know exactly where to start, I used Google and found the zmanda.com 15 minute guide (the PDF version) which referenced these configuration tools. (I too have been using Unix since 1975, but Amanda only since last week :-)

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