bimagemgr.pl
14 May 2006

This is a utility to monitor and burn file backups to CDR. It is a web
based interface written in perl. It requires perl and an apache or other
http server. It also requires the perl DBI module and the driver for the
database used to store your bacula catalog. It has been tested on MySQL
catalogs but an untested configuration is present for Postgresql and SQLite.

It can be run on the same server as bacula or on another machine on the 
network if you are willing to relax permissions on the backup Volume files 
(see below).

Installation from tarball:
1. Examine the Makefile and adjust it to your configuration if needed.
2. Edit config.pm to fit your configuration.
3. Do 'make install' as root.
4. Edit httpd.conf and change the Timeout value. The web server must not time
out and close the connection before the burn process is finished. The exact
value needed may vary depending upon your cd recorder speed and whether you are
burning on the bacula server on on another machine across your network. In my 
case I set it to 1000 seconds. Restart httpd.
5. Make sure that cdrecord is setuid root.

Installation from rpm package:
1. Install the rpm package for your platform.
2. Edit /cgi-bin/config.pm to fit your configuration.
3. Edit httpd.conf and change the Timeout value. The web server must not time
out and close the connection before the burn process is finished. The exact
value needed may vary depending upon your cd recorder speed and whether you are
burning on the bacula server on on another machine across your network. In my 
case I set it to 1000 seconds. Restart httpd.
4. Make sure that cdrecord is setuid root.

For bacula systems less than 1.36:
1. Edit the configuration section of config.pm to fit your configuration.
2. Run /etc/bacula/create_cdimage_table.pl from a console on your bacula
server (as root) to add the CDImage table to your bacula database.

Accessing the Volume files:
The Volume files by default have permissions 640 and can only be read by root. 
The recommended approach to this is as follows (and only works if bimagemgr and 
apache are running on the same host as bacula.

For bacula-1.34 or 1.36 installed from tarball -
1. Create a new user group bacula and add the user apache to the group for 
Red Hat or Mandrake systems. For SuSE systems add the user wwwrun to the 
bacula group.
2. Change ownership of all of your Volume files to root.bacula
3. Edit the /etc/bacula/bacula startup script and set SD_USER=root and 
SD_GROUP=bacula. Restart bacula.

Note: step 3 should also be done in /etc/init.d/bacula-sd but released versions
of this file prior to 1.36 do not support it. In that case it would be necessary after 
a reboot of the server to execute '/etc/bacula/bacula restart'.

For bacula-1.38 installed from tarball -
1. Your configure statement should include:
	--with-dir-user=bacula
        --with-dir-group=bacula
        --with-sd-user=bacula
        --with-sd-group=disk
        --with-fd-user=root
        --with-fd-group=bacula
2. Add the user apache to the bacula group for Red Hat or Mandrake systems. 
For SuSE systems add the user wwwrun to the bacula group.
3. Check/change ownership of all of your Volume files to root.bacula

For bacula-1.36 or bacula-1.38 installed from rpm -
1. Add the user apache to the group bacula for Red Hat or Mandrake systems. 
For SuSE systems add the user wwwrun to the bacula group.
2. Check/change ownership of all of your Volume files to root.bacula

bimagemgr installed from rpm > 1.38.9 will add the web server user to the 
bacula group in a post install script. Be sure to edit the configuration 
information in config.pm after installation of rpm package.

bimagemgr will now be able to read the Volume files but they are still not 
world readable.

If you are running bimagemgr on another host (not recommended) then you will
need to change the permissions on all of your backup volume files to 644 in 
order to access them via nfs share or other means. This approach should only 
be taken if you are sure of the security of your environment as it exposes 
the backup Volume files to world read.

That's it. Call the script from a web browser as http://server/cgi-bin/bimagemgr.pl
place a blank cd in your recorder and press a Burn button. See the bimagemgr section 
in the bacula manual for more information.