Basic information

Purpose

Starting from version 1.2.0 Bacularis provides deployment functions. It is set of web tools available on the Bacularis web interface, that enables installing and configuring Bacularis and Bacula components on remote hosts. This way users can install for example Bacula client or Bacula storage daemon on selected hosts, and later upgrade them and also remove them if needed.

This function has been introduced to ease process preparing and adding new hosts with Bacula software to the Bacula infrastructure with subsequent management.

General idea

The deployment of the Bacularis and Bacula components consists of two main steps:

  1. deploy Bacularis API to remote host using SSH

  2. install/upgrade/remove Bacula components on remote hosts using HTTP API access

The main idea is to provide to remote host everything what needed to manage Bacula components in the first step. Actions on the Bacula components from the second step can be done anytime later after deployment.

The API deployment process includues the following actions:

  • preparing Bacularis and Bacula repositories

  • add SUDO settings

  • install Bacularis

  • configure Bacularis

  • create Bacularis user and password

  • start Bacularis

After deploying the API there become accessible the following Bacula component actions:

  • install the Bacula director, the Bacula storage, the Bacula client or bconsole

  • set component autostart

  • for Bacula storage and client add them to the current Bacula director

  • start components

The above steps are realized by the Bacularis web interface and they do not require manual settings nor logging in to remote host.

../_images/bacularis_deploy_api_to_remote_host.png

Supported operating systems

Bacularis can be deployed on hosts with any operating system that have SSH server configured. So they are any type of UNIX-like systems. Deployment on Windows host is not supported so far.

Thanks to introducing in Bacularis OS profiles function administrators can create and define own deployment steps adjusted to their opearting systems. By default there are available pre-defined OS profiles for popular RPM-based and DEB-based operating systems. More information about profiles you can find in the OS profiles chapter.

Requirements

On the host with the Bacularis web interface are required a few basic tools like:

  • expect

  • SSH binary (SSH client)

  • SCP binary

  • GPG binary (GnuPG)

On the new remote hosts is needed to have:

  • SSH server enabled for administrator user account. There is possible access by user/password credentials or by SSH key.

  • OpenSSL binary for generating web server certificate (if HTTPS option is selected)

The above requirements are not installed automatically and if they are missing, they need to be installed manually.