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LONE-TAR(tm) Technical Article #1018
Release Notes LONE-TAR v4.3.1.3
April 15, 2008
(c)2008 Lone Star Software Corp. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
----------------------------------------------------

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--------------------------------------------

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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Table Of Contents:
==================
1. 64 bit enabled release
2. New SCSI Engine
3. New Feature -zCASCADE
4. Now '.bz2' zipped archives are supported
5. Enhanced retry for some disk errors
6. Quick View of Status in CATALOG file
7. Enhanced reporting and retry for disk errors
8. Directory only restore
9. Enhanced exclusion capability for corrupted or known problem files
10. Exclusion list file enhanced
11. New methods of controlling remote execution
12. Minor enhancement to LT_SUFFIXES
13. Minor enhancement for built in compression exclusions
14. Bit Level Verification enhanced
15. Additional level of Encryption Protection
16. RESCUE-RANGER(tm) New Release (No Charge Upgrade)

BUG FIXES / MODIFICATIONS
-------------------------
A. Stealth option and fast file restore (FASTSEEK) fixed
B. Stealth option and linked files in the catalog fixed
C. Stealth option cosmetic changes
D. Interrupt core dump fixed
E. Offset error 13 with large number during verify of tape/rev drive
F. Race condition with '/log/ChangedFiles' fixed
- Trademark and Copyright Notices

==== END Table Of Contents ====


1. 64 BIT ENABLED RELEASE
----------------------
This release has true internal 64 bit support in all capacities.
This means the 2 GB limitation on operating systems that support
large file systems is completely eliminated. In this release there
are two native 64 bit binaries. One of the releases is for
64 bit Linux. This supports both the 2.4 kernel using 64 bit and
the 2.6 kernel using 64 bit. It supports all of the 64 bit AMD
series CPU.

For the 64 bit support for Linux, it is strongly recommended that you
have version 2.3.4 or higher of the 'libc' module. This is found in
/lib64 and normally there is a symbolic link such as libc.so.6 ->
libc-2.3.4.so This library shipped with systems dated beyond Aug 5,
2005 so if your system is older than that, you should have no
problems. Theoretically, any libc-2.x version should be supported
but we have done no testing in that environment. If you have any
doubts, you can request a static 64 bit version which has the library
embedded into the binary and requires no linking at run-time. It
just works, but you must be reminded that the binary is huge and
occupies a lot of space. This might be a problem if you are
maintaining RESCUE-RANGER(tm) Disaster recovery media that has
limited space.

2. NEW SCSI ENGINE
---------------
The development team finally did it. They bit the bullet and added a
completely new from the ground up SCSI engine in the Linux version of
LONE-TAR. This new SCSI engine incorporates many of the newer
SCSI features in the advanced 2.4 kernels and all of the 2.6 kernels.
In all previous releases of LONE-TAR, you were required to have the
SCSI GENERIC (sg.o) driver automatically loaded and running. On some
versions of Linux, this was a real pain because was not automatically
provided with the built in kernel. With the advanced SCSI engine in
the 4.3.1.3 release and higher of LONE-TAR, you do not need to have
the SCSI generic driver at all.

The new SCSI engine is streamlined for speed and agility and takes
advantage of all the new SCSI hooks in the kernel. Unlike the
classic SCSI Engine, the new engine does not generate excessive
warning messages to the console during operation. For a few users
this was quite annoying and was difficult to turn off. Our analysis
showed it was an errant understanding of the Linux Kernel SCSI driver
by a few programmers but the code stuck in the kernel and remained.
The new SCSI engine was made to be backward compatible with the
classic SCSI engine. You can force LONE-TAR to use the classic
engine by using and setting an environment variable SCSI_DRIVER=1 and
export this variable. To make changes permanently, you should do
this through the LONE-TAR Menu System 'ltmenu'.

There are a few other options for this variable and they will be
documented below:

SCSI_DRIVER=1 This is the classic SCSI Engine, it may generate
warning messages on some advanced kernels
SCSI_DRIVER=2 This is the new SCSI Engine
SCSI_DRIVER=3 This is another variant that does not require the
sg.o module. Use only if requested by Tech Support

3. NEW FEATURE -zCASCADE
---------------------
You asked for it and you got it...the new and exciting -zCASCADE
option!! This option allows you to split up your backup to multiple
numbered files. You might want to do this if you plan on later
archiving the files to DVD and want a pre-planned size for the files.
If your system has a 2Gb limit and you wish to perform disk-to-disk
backup, this feature is a life-saver. When you invoke the -zCASCADE
option, LONE-TAR considers the archive device name that you used to
be a disk file name. For example if you used the name med.ltar,
LONE-TAR would break the archives into files named med.ltar,
med.001, med.002, med.003 ... until the archive is complete.
LONE-TAR uses the capacity you specify for the device for the cut
off value to create a new volume and automatically switch to it.
If you used the command:

# lonetar MVfbk /Backups/med_Aug20/med.ltar 20 2g ./usr/med.data -zCASCADE

When your backup is complete you will see a series of files in the
folder /Backups/medical_Aug20 all starting with the prefix med.ltar
and a numbered suffix. Note that the original med.ltar is used
without the .000 suffix for backward compatibility for shell scripts.
These scripts expect the data to be in the name that is given. So
LONE-TAR does not use the .000 suffix for the first name and uses
.001 for the second and so forth. If the backup was 7 gigabytes you
would see the following archive files:

med.ltar med.001 med.002 med.003

The file med.003 would only have about 1 Gigabyte of data in it.
You must use the -zCASCADE option on the listing, bit-level verify
and restore features, and otherwise LONE-TAR will not know to
consider that you originally created a CASCADED archive. You will
love this feature and its flexibility will prove very useful. It
will greatly enable automated disk-to-disk backups with file purging
as the backups age with just a few simple shell scripts, or even
better yet, you can try the new cascading feature direct from the
LONE-TAR Menu 'ltmenu'. Additionally, should you choose to archive some
files to DVD or even and entire backup, this can be done during the
day with an attended operator present to switch the DVD volumes.
When the CASCADE option changes volumes, you will see the following
messages on your screen and catalog files.

AUTOMATIC SWITCH TO VOLUME: 3 ON DRIVE: med.002

or something to that order depending on the number of volumes. If
you do not wish to split files across the volumes, you can always use
the -e option also on the command-line. In this manner, your disk
files are basically completely self contained and this might be
useful on a restore of a very old archive from the DVD where the DVD
had become corrupted. Unlike the use of the -e option with fixed
archives such as tapes and DVD, there is no problem if you encounter
large files as long as the largest file is no bigger than the volume
you specify. Obviously in that case you must split the file to fit
it into the drive segment. But in general, LONE-TAR will finish a
segment and will start a new segment automatically when the -e option
is used. Unlike tape, you do not end up wasting any disk space so
this can be a useful option when you use CASCADING.

4. NOW .bz2 ZIPPED ARCHIVES are SUPPORTED
--------------------------------------
Many of you are downloading software that is zipped. A very common
format is the Bzip2 compression format. Archives that are
compressed in this format end with the .bz2 suffix. Many of you like
the built in feature of LONE-TAR to be able to automatically list of
extract compressed archives without having to pre-expand them first.
With larger archives, it is not uncommon to run out of space. Now
you don't have to!!

5. ENHANCED RETRY FOR SOME DISK ERRORS
-----------------------------------
This new version of LONE-TAR has many new internal built-in features
to recognize SCSI block size and tar block size differences in
archives. This is especially important for tape recoveries or
reading a tape that has been sent to you by a friend or another
office. Almost always, there would be a mismatch in either the SCSI
block size or the tar format higher level block size. This required
often hours of fiddling around.

6. QUICK VIEW of STATUS in CATALOG FILE
------------------------------------
The overall status of the backup or verify is not placed directly in
the catalog file at the very end. The menu system always reported
the exit status but this allows those command-line experts and shell
scripters to have easy information after the fact at your finger
tips. If you are restoring an old archive, it is nice to know if the
backup was successful or not and what might have gone wrong. And
this feature is irreplaceable for Bit-Level Verify issues. Remember
an exit status of 0 is the very best!! This means no errors at all
were found. Any other exit code means there were problems or issues
and you should refer to the LONE-TAR menu documentation for a meaning
of the all the exit codes.

7. ENHANCED REPORTING AND RETRY FOR DISK ERRORS
--------------------------------------------
The error recovery features when reading archives on tape or disk have
been significantly enhanced. The reporting is more meaningful and
helpful.

8. DIRECTORY ONLY RESTORE
----------------------
Since the introduction of the defragmentation feature on restore and
the pre-built method of creating directories with the exact number of
slots and date, some of you have noticed a slight change in recovery
from previous releases. When the new directory recording method is
used, the directory meta data (owner, modification times, number of
slots) is recorded. So to restore only a directory and not the files
in the directory, you must restore the name without a trailing slash.
If, for example you want to restore the directory '/usr/data' and all
its meta-data but not its files, you would use from the command-line

# lone-tar xvfb tape_device 20 ./usr/data

If you wanted to restore all the files *and* the directory,
you would use:

# lone-tar xsvfb tape_device 20 ./usr/data/

Either the trailing slash or the trailing slash followed by an
asterisk signifies to LONE-TAR that you want all the files in
the directory restored.

9. ENHANCED EXCLUSION CAPABILITY FOR CORRUPTED OR KNOWN PROBLEM FILES
------------------------------------------------------------------
The new LONE-TAR engine when it encounters a bizarre error such as
a corrupted inode or a very strange permission access issue will now
first check the exclude list before reporting it as an error. Some
of you know about these problem files and they are difficult to fix
requiring operating system reload or reformatting the file system.
You have indicated to us that you would rather not have the error
reported if this banged up file has been put in the exclude list. By
the very fact that the file is in the exclude list, it means the
System Administrator is very aware of the situation and does not need
to be reminded every night by the LONE-TAR backup summaries.


10. EXCLUSION LIST FILE ENHANCED
----------------------------
The exclusion list file has additional format that make it easier to
exclude files and directories with spaces and other odd characters in
the name. It now understands both a leading and trailing single or
double quote. Additionally, if you accidentally leave trailing
spaces after an exclusion item, LONE-TAR will figure out what you
really meant. In previous versions there was nothing more annoying
than editing an exclusion list to be used with the -X option only to
find out that LONE-TAR did not actually exclude this file because it
was really excluding the same filename with physical spaces embedded
after the name. This new version saves you time and makes your
life easier.

11. NEW METHODS OF CONTROLLING REMOTE EXECUTION
-------------------------------------------
At times when using the very sophisticated and powerful remote file
transfer capabilities of the product, built-in error message
reporting might be misleading. For example, if the data was going to
a remote DVD drive the error might refer to a network error and
LONE-TAR is not really so aware of the exact nature of the remote
device. It was therefore difficult for LONE-TAR to produce a perfect
and unambiguous error message if something went wrong.

Now you have full control over this by using and setting the
REMOTE_ERR environment variable. This should be set to the actual
text of the message you want LONE-TAR to put out if the remote
execution or transfer of data happens. This new error control is
only in effect when the REMOTE_PUT or REMOTE_GET environment
variables are set and used. LONE-TAR will precede the error message
with lone-tar:. So this gives you full control in those situations
here you need this level of control


12. MINOR ENHANCEMENT TO LT_SUFFIXES
--------------------------------
Some of you have quite a few file types and include many of them in
the LT_SUFFIXES environment variable. The internal limitation on
this was increased to 60 which as to our knowledge, nobody has yet to
exceed. This should give you all the flexibility in dealing with
compression exclusion of different file types.

13. MINOR ENHANCEMENT FOR BUILT IN COMPRESSION EXCLUSIONS
---------------------------------------------------
More common file types were added to the automatic exclusion of
compression. All the new compression schemes are now recognized.


14. BIT LEVEL VERIFICATION ENHANCED
-------------------------------
Although quite rare, LONE-TAR will now identify a file whose date has
been moved backward in time. This can detect intruders as they will
often move a date backward in time. LONE-TAR will not bit-level-verify
these files since the date and presumably the data have been changed.
It is not worth flagging it as an error when the date has been moved
back intentionally through benign or hostile intentions.

15. ADDITIONAL LEVEL OF ENCRYPTION PROTECTION
-----------------------------------------
The LONE-TAR Encryption Module has been a fabulous feature for
those companies wanting extra security for their data. There
are times where you may want to change the encryption key. In this
case, the new Encryption Key version will require the user to
enter the previous key before allowing a new key to be accepted.

In the event an Encryption Key is changed, a specified user
(other then root) can be notified as well. This feature will
allow the owner of a company, or the CIO, to know if a user
changed the Encryption Key without permission, or an attempt to
sabotage the data by withholding the Encryption Key. One may argue
that if a user can login as 'root' then what's the point of this
feature? It's not bullet proof, but there are many companies where
a programmer may need to be logged in as user 'root' or use the
'asroot' command, and are instructed to stay within the directory
tree where the database work is being performed. This is a case where
this feature would be priceless.

16. RESCUE-RANGER ENHANCEMENTS
--------------------------
The new release of RESCUE-RANGER now supports all the new features
in LONE-TAR v4.3.1.3. RESCUE-RANGER now supports SSH, FTP,
NAS (Samba/NFS) devices as well as CASCADE backups.

If you have LONE-TAR v4.2 or greater, then you should upgrade to:

- Rescue-Ranger v2.6.8 for LINUX
ftp.cactus.com/pub/linux/rrv268.tar.gz

- Rescue-Ranger v1.3.0 for SCO OSR5.0.5 -> 5.0.7
ftp.cactus.com/pub/sco5/rrv130.tar.Z

This is a FREE upgrade, so please do so immediately.

NOTE: Effective the date of this Technical Article #1018,
LONE-TAR downloads from our website already have this module.


========================
MODIFICATIONS / BUG FIXS
========================

A. STEALTH OPTION AND FAST FILE RESTORE FIXED
--------------------------------------------
There were some problems with FAST-SEEK restores of some select files
or directories under certain circumstances. The result of this bug
was that it took longer to restore the files because the fast seek
restore could not be used. This bug has been fixed in this release.


B. STEALTH OPTION AND LINKED FILES IN THE CATALOG FIXED
------------------------------------------------------
The previous version of the STEALTH option was not correctly
reporting some linked files or symbolically linked files in the
catalog. Some of you with parsers who expected a certain format in
the catalog were running into difficulty. The old format of
recording linked files has been reinstated when using the STEALTH
option, so your parsers will work fine with this new version

C. STEALTH OPTION COSMETIC CHANGES
-----------------------------------
A few cosmetic changes were made to the way the STEALTH OPTION
reported and recorded information on the screen. Since the STEALTH
OPTION saves much screen output and instead puts the information into
the catalog file, the information that is presented on the screen is
important and must be in its own cosmetically appealing format no
matter what the circumstances are. Some annoying features of the old
version were improved in this version.

D. INTERRUPT CORE DUMP FIXED
---------------------------
On some very sensitive operating systems with extensive security
buffer over flow detection schemes in place, the operating system
would warn about the use of memory pointed to LONE-TAR when
LONE-TAR was interrupted one or more times during the same
session and then was allowed to complete. This problem was fixed.

E. OFFSET ERROR 13 with LARGE NUMBER DURING VERIFY OF TAPE/REV DRIVE
------------------------------------------------------------------
An error 13 with a large number would appear. The large number
appeared to be out of context and provided little or no useful
information. This error condition reporting has been addressed in
this release and now only meaning information is provided.

F. RACE CONDITION WITH /log/ChangedFiles FIXED
--------------------------------------------
When two or more LONE-TAR binaries were running simultaneously or in
parallel and they were both performing Bit-level verification on
different aspects of a file system there were some anomalies seen in
the /log/ChangedFiles catalog file. This has been fixed so that the
file will always represent only the last LONE-TAR that has been
running. The details of the first running LONE-TAR will be cataloged
in detail in the primary bit-level verification catalog file and not
in /log/ChangedFiles.


-------------- COPYRIGHT & TRADEMARK CREDITS ---------------
o LONE-TAR, AIR-BAG, RESCUE-RANGER are registered trademarks
of Lone Star Software Corp. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
o TAPE-TELL, CRONY, WEBINIZED, BLT, LASO and LTX are
trademarks of Lone Star Software Corp.
o The following URL names are trademarks of Lone Star Software Corp.
OffSiteDataProtection.net, BackupServer.net, BackupAppliance.net
o LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds
o SCO is a trademark of The SCO Group
o All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the
property of their respective holders.

**************** END OF LONE-TAR 4.3.1.3 RELEASE NOTES ****************