PSARC 2007/397 NDMP Service

[Michael Shapiro]

I'm sponsoring the following fast-track for Reza Sabdar to introduce the NDMP
Service into Solaris.  The binding is intended for a Micro release.
The timer is set to expire on Friday the 13th (cue spooky music).

NDMP is a backup protocol that is commonly used by storage devices in the
industry.  More information is found at http://www.ndmp.org.   In simplest
terms NDMP is a standard control protocol that permits a backup application
to instruct a server to do a backup: the data part of the protocol is left
up the server that is being asked to do the backup or restore.  NDMP's
control protocol is a relatively simple XDR-RPC implementation.

The proposed NDMP implementation would permit Solaris systems to receive
such instructions and backup any filesystem using the tar format.  We could
extend our implementation later to support other formats as required.

Since this is relatively straightforward implementation of a relatively small
industry-standard protocol, my present inclination is that this is just at
the line for a fast-track rather than full project review since fundamentally
we're not reviewing the protocol or the output format (standard Solaris tar),
but instead just a set of simple command-line utilities.  If after looking
at the materials people feel a full review is needed we can of course do
that, or alternatively extend the fast-track timer for more questions.

The inception.materials/ directory has these files, which I've listed
in the suggested reading order with a brief synopsis:

ndmp_20questions.txt - PSARC 20questions
ndmpd.1.txt          - draft ndmpd man page
ndmpadm.1m.txt       - draft ndmpadm man page
ndmpstat.1m.txt      - draft ndmpstat man page
ndmp_design.pdf      - design document for ndmpd

Additional background reading:

ndmp_one_pager.txt   - one-pager explaining the project overview
ndmpadm_design.pdf   - details of ndmpadm(1M)'s internal design
draft-skardal-ndmp4-04.txt - IETF protocol info for NDMP

-Mike

-- 
Mike Shapiro, Solaris Kernel Development. blogs.sun.com/mws/