Bacula 1.30 User's Guide | Chapter 18

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# The Windows Version of Bacula

## General

At the current time only the File daemon or Client program has been tested on Windows. As a consequence, when we speak of the Windows version of Bacula below, we are referring to the File daemon only.

The Windows version of the Bacula File daemon has been tested on Win98, WinMe, WinNT, and Win2000 systems. We have coded to support Win95, but no longer have a system for testing. The Windows version of Bacula has been built to run under the CYGWIN environment, which provides many of the features of Unix on Windows systems. It also permitted a rapid port with very few source code changes, which means that the Windows version is for the most part running code that has long proved stable on Unix systems. Even though the Win32 version of Bacula is a port that relies on many Unix features, it is just the same a true Windows program. When running, it is perfectly integrated with Windows and displays its icon in the system icon tray, and provides a system tray menu to obtain additional information on how Bacula is running (status and events dialog boxes). If so desired, it can also be stopped by using the system tray menu, though this should normally never be necessary.

Once installed Bacula normally runs as a system service. This means that it is immediately started by the operating system when the system is booted, and runs in the background even if there is no user logged into the system.

### Installation

Normally, you will install the Windows version of Bacula from the binaries. This install is somewhat Unix like since you do some parts of the installation by hand. To install the binaries, you need WinZip.

- Simply double click on the winbacula-1.xx.0.tar.gz icon. The actual name of the icon will vary from one release version to another.

- When Zip says that it has one file and asks if it should unpack it into a temporary file, respond with Yes.

- You will then be presented with a WinZip dialogue that should look something like the following:

- Ensure that you extract all files and that the extraction will go into C:\

- If you have installed CYGWIN on your system (very few of you have), you should install Bacula into the C:\cygwin directory rather than C:\ as indicated above for a non-CYGWIN installation.

If you wish to install the package elsewhere, please note that you will need to proceed with a manual installation, which is not particularly easy as you must rebuild the source and change the configuration file as well.

This installation assumes that you do not have CYGWIN installed on your computer. If you do, you will need to take care to observe the minor differences to the standard installation that we will note in this text. If you use the standard installation scripts, they will remove your mount points (automatically setup by the CYGWIN installation) and CYGWIN will no longer work until it is re-installed.

Once you have unzipped the binaries, open a window pointing to the binary installation folder (normally c:\bacula). This folder should contain additional folders such as bin. (For CYGWIN installations, this is c:\cygwin\bin, ...).

Continuing the installation process:

- Open the directory c:\bacula\bin\bacula-fd.conf in the Windows Explorer by Clicking on the bacula folder then on the bin folder. Finally double click on the file bacula-fd.conf and edit it to contain the values appropriate for your site. In most cases, no changes will be needed, but you probably should change the name to be something unique on your system so that you can easily distinguish messages coming from different daemons.
- To do the final step of installation, double click on the Install.bat program. (For CYGWIN installations use the CygwinInstall.bat program.)
  This script will setup the appropriate mount points for the directories that Bacula uses, it will install Bacula in the system registry.

  If everything went well, you will get something similar to the following output in a DOS shell window:

  What is important to verify in the DOS window is that the root directory \ is mounted on device c:\. (Ignore this on CYGWIN installations).

  The DOS window will be followed immediately by a Windows dialog box as follows:

- On Windows 98, Windows 95, or Windows Me, to actually start the service, either reboot the machine, which is not necessary, or double click on the Start icon in the c:\bacula\bin folder.
- On Windows NT, to start the service, either reboot the machine, which is not necessary, or go to the Control Panel, open the Services folder and start the Bacula Service by selecting the Bacula File Server:

  Please ensure that the service can interact with the desktop. To do so, click on the Sartup... button, and you should have something similar to the following:

That should complete the installation process. When the Bacula File Server is ready to serve files, an icon representing a diskette will appear in the system tray; right click on it and a menu will appear. Select the Events item, and the Events dialog box should appear. There should be no error messages. By right clicking again on the system tray plug and selecting the Status item, you can verify that all the whether any jobs are running or not.

When the Bacula File Server begins saving files, the color of the holes in the diskette will change from white to green , and if there is an error, the holes in the diskette will change to red .

### Installation Directory

The Win32 version of Bacula must reside in the c:\Bacula\ directory, and there must be a c:\tmp directory on your machine. The installation will do this automatically, and we recommend that you do not attempt to place Bacula in another directory. If you do so, you are on your own, and you will need to do a rebuild of the source.

### Upgrading

On Win98 systems, to upgrade to a new release, simply stop Bacula by using the tray icon and selecting the Close Bacula menu item, or by double clicking on the Stop icon located in the c:\bacula\bin directory, then apply the upgrade and restart Bacula.

On WinNT, WinXP, and Win2K systems, you may stop Bacula as indicated above or alternatively you may stop Bacula by using the Services item in the Control Panel. Then to restart Bacula after the new files have been loaded, go to the Services dialog as shown above in the installation instructions and click on Start. On WinXP systems, the Services dialog is a bit different and is found by following: Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Component Services. Then click on Services (Local) in the left hand menu window and the services should appear in the right hand window, from which point, you can select Bacula and start it.

### Post Installation

After installing Bacula and before running it, you should check the contents of c:\bacula\bin\bacula-fd.conf to ensure that it corresponds to your configuration.

### Dealing with Problems

The most likely source of problems is authentication when the Director attempts to connect to the File daemon that you installed. This can occur if the names and the passwords defined in the File daemon's configuration file c:\bacula\bin\bacula-fd.conf on the Windows machine do not match with the names and the passwords in the Director's configuration file bacula-dir.conf located on your Unix/Linux server.

More specifically, the password found in the Client resource in the Director's configuration file must be the same as the password in the Director resource of the File daemon's configuration file. In addition, the name of the Director resource in the File daemon's configuration file must be the same as the name in the Director resource of the Director's configuration file.

It is a bit hard to explain in words, but if you understand that a Director normally has multiple Clients and a Client (or File daemon) may permit access by multiple Directors, you can see that the names and the passwords on both sides must match for proper authentication.

Running Unix like programs on Windows machines is a bit frustrating because the Windows command line shell (DOS Window) is rather primitive. As a consequence, it is not generally possible to see the debug information and certain error messages that Bacula prints. With a bit of work, however, it is possible. When everything else fails and you want to see what is going on, try the following:

       Start a DOS shell Window.

       cd c:\bacula\bin
       bacula-fd -t >out
       type out

The -t option will cause Bacula to read the configuration file, print any error messages and then exit. the > redirects the output to the file named out, which you can list with the type command.

If something is going wrong later, or you want to run Bacula with a debug option, you might try starting it as:

       bacula-fd -b100 >out

In this case, Bacula will run until you explicitly stop it, which will give you a chance to connect to it from your Unix/Linux server.

Finally, you can look in the System Applications log to find any Windows errors that Bacula got during the startup process.

### Utility Functions

The directory c:\Bacula\bin contains six utility routines (actually .pif files) that you may find useful. They are:

    Start
    Stop
    Install
    Uninstall

Any of these utilities may be used on any system, with the exception of the Start utility, which cannot be used on WinNT and Win2000 systems. On those systems, the Bacula service must always be started through the Services sub-dialog of the Control Panel.

The Install and Uninstall utilities install and uninstall Bacula from the system registry only. All other pieces (files) of Bacula remain intact. It is not absolutely necessary for Bacula to be installed in the registry as it can run as a regular program. However, if it is not installed in the registry, it cannot be run as a service.

### The Console Program

The Bacula Console program has been included in the distribution in the Bacula bin directory. You can execute it from any Windows DOS box. Using this program, you can start a job on the main server (Director) from your Windows workstation.

### The testfind Program

A program named testfind is also included in the Bacula bin directory. This program is documented in the testfind section of the Utility Tools chapter of this manual. It permits you to list the files that will be backed up given the list of Include statements from your Director's configuration file.

### Command Line Options Specific to the Windows Version

These options are not normally seen or used by the user, and are documented here only for information purposes. At the current time, to change the default options, you must either manually run Bacula or you must manually edit the system registry and modify the appropriate entries.

In order to avoid option clashes between the options necessary for Bacula to run on Windows and the standard Bacula options, all Windows specific options are signaled with a forward slash character (/), while as usual, the standard Bacula options are signaled with a minus (-), or a minus minus (--). All the standard Bacula options can be used on the Windows version. In addition, the following Windows only options are implemented:

/servicehelper
  Run the service helper application
/service
  Start Bacula as a service
/run
  Run the Bacula application
/install
  Install Bacula as a service in the system registry
/remove
  Uninstall Bacula from the system registry
/about
  Show the Bacula about dialogue box
/status
  Show the Bacula status dialogue box
/events
  Show the Bacula events dialogue box (not yet implemented)
/kill
  Stop any running Bacula
/help
  Show the Bacula help dialogue box

It is important to note that under normal circumstances the user should never need to use these options as they are normally handled by the system automatically once Bacula is installed. However, you may note these options in some of the .pif and .bat files that have been created for your use.

### Building the Win32 Version from the Source

If you have the source code, follow the standard procedures for building Bacula on Unix in the Installation Section of this manual. Please don't forget to look at the Win32 specific instructions.

What to do when Bacula crashes (Kaboom) | Index | Using Bacula to Improve Computer Security

Bacula 1.30 User's Guide The Network Backup Solution | Copyright © 2000-2003 Kern Sibbald and John Walker