I have a few questions about dumping to tapes:

  1.  Does one need to be in single-user mode when doing dumps?
    I would assume that, if one is still multi-user, the worst
    case is that any open files may not be backed up in a sane
    manner.  I've been doing multi-user dumps for two years now,
    and haven't yet run into a problem when restoring, but we
    don't restore very often.
  
  I've recently become main sysadmin for a bunch of Suns
  (running Solaris 2.4 and 2.5), so one of the first things I
  did was turn a spare PC into a NetBSD dump, NFS, and YP/NIS
  server :).  I've done a few dumps, but have some
  Solaris-and-NetBSD-related dump questions:

  2.  Sun's ufsdump doesn't seem to support the RCMD_CMD
      environment variable.  I'd like to disable telnet, rsh, and
      rlogin on the NetBSD box (and just use ssh), but it
      appears I'll need rsh to do remote dumps.  I've thought
      of a few possibilities:
      a.  Set up a bogus userid dumper, and run rshd as user
	  dumper in /etc/inetd.conf.  Make dumper have full access
	  privileges to /dev/*st0.  This would prevent other
	  users from using rsh for anything (that's the goal).
      b.  Port some other dump program to Solaris.  I tried
	  compiling NetBSD's dump, since these Suns are using
	  ufs as their filesystem, but ran into more porting
	  issues than I was willing to deal with.

      Does anyone else have a secure setup that involves dumping
      from Solaris boxes to a NetBSD box (of any flavor)?

  And a question that's more Sun-oriented:
  3.  After doing a level-0 backup of a Sun's /home yesterday,
      while still multi-user, some users' files are missing. 
      Is ufsdump that untrustworthy that it can clobber
      existing files?  Luckily, most of the files made it to the
      tape before being clobbered, but a couple have disappeared
      into the ether.  (We don't believe any malicious user
      broke in and removed these files).

  Thanks for any help.  I'm seriously thinking about turning the
NetBSD box into the file server, given the apparent lossage
from using ufsdump and the problems with remote dumps from
Suns.

  Brian
-- 
Brian Grayson (bgrayson@ece.utexas.edu)
PhD Candidate, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UT at Austin
Office:  ENS 406       (512) 471-8011
Finger bgrayson@orac.ece.utexas.edu for PGP key.