First off I want to state that this is not a supported EMC “product” or setup. This was done with an idea from David Payne at an Avamar User Group and a solution I came up with. I don’t know how well it scales, but thought it was a pretty cool idea/concept.

Ok with that being said the whole idea of this post is to show you how you can setup web based access to Avamar’s backups. The objectives I was trying to achieve are:

·         Provide file level access to Avamar Backups

·         Do not open AvFS/Samba access to all workstations/subnets (basically have a proxy)

·         Provide an “easy to use” web based interface

·         Provide search capabilities

·       Provide RBAC via Active Directory

·         Low to no cost

With this solution I have been able to accomplish all of these except the search capabilities (it works, but on a very limited basis so I consider it non-existent and even remove it from the web interface). Let’s get on with it.

Click here to watch the video!

The Setup/Requirements:

1.      You have an Avamar Grid and have configured AvFS (Avamar File System) – You can do this by following “’EMC Technical Note P/N 300-009-660”.

2.       You have configured Avamar LDAP and your krb5.conf and ldap.properties files are the same in both /etc/ and in /usr/local/avamar/etc/. Have EMC help you do this or follow the Avamar System Installation Guide starting on page 88. The key is that you need to have your krb5.conf and ldap.properties files configured correctly. Here are my krb5.conf and ldap.properties files I am using on my demo Avamar grids.

        krb5.conf (same on both grids)

        ldap.properties (same on both grids)

3.       Once you have LDAP configured it is time to get SAMBA configured correctly. The files we will be modifying are “/etc/samba/smb.conf” and “/etc/nsswitch.conf”. Here are my smb.conf and nsswitch.conf files I am using on my demo Avamar grids.

        smb.conf from gridA

        smb.conf from gribB

        nsswitch.conf (same on both grids)

4.       Now we need to start the winbind service. Do this by typing “service winbind start”.

5.    Now that we have these files setup correctly it is time to join our Avamar grids to the domain. The first thing we need to do is perform a “kinit administrator@domain.com” and put in the password for administrator in that domain. This creates a kerberos ticket and will allow us to join the grid to the domain. Once you have performed a kinit go ahead and perform the following command to join the grid: “net ads join -Uadministrator%Password”. This should come back and tell you it was joined to that realm successfully, you should also now see the utility node’s name/computer account inside of Active Directory. I used this site to help guide me through this: http://www.howtoforge.com/samba_active_directory

6.      Once the grid is joined to the domain test it by typing “wbinfo –g” and this should return a list of groups in the domain. Once you have this step working let’s restart all the services and then proceed to setting up the IntegraTUM Webdisk component. Restart the services by typing “service axionfs restart”, “service winbind restart”, “service smb restart”.

7.      Make sure you have a server setup on the subnet/IP that you configured your smb.conf file to allow. In my case I am using a Windows 2003 Server.

·         You need to download and install Apache Tomcat 6.x or 7.x, you can download version 7 by clicking here.

·         Download and install the latest Java JDK. – http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

·         Download IntegraTUM Webdisk and extract it to the C:\webdisk\ba\. (NOTE Make sure you extract the contents of the IntegraTUM_WebDisk_0.44 folder into the C:\webdisk\ba\ not the folder itself) – http://sourceforge.net/projects/webdisk/files/webdisk/0.44/

·         Create a new xml file called ba.xml in the following location: C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0\conf\Catalina\localhost\ or wherever your Tomcat installation is (this is the default). Put this inside of your ba.xml file and save it:

<Context path=”/ba” docBase=”c:/webdisk/ba/webapp” debug=”0″ reloadable=”false”>

<Manager className=”org.apache.catalina.session.PersistentManager” saveOnRestart=”false” />

</Context>

The URL for the installation instructions is: http://www.simple-groupware.de/cms/WebDisk/Installation

·         Before we restart Apache Tomcat lets configure our IntegraTUM Webdisk properties to add our Avamar grids. Please see my configuration file for how I did it.

C:\webdisk\ba\webapp\WEB-INF\web.xml (renamed from web-default.xml)

8.      Once you have this configured go ahead and start up Apache Tomcat and test your domain account logins to the IntegraTUm Webdisk and see if you can access the Avamar grids. Please note I will show you my entire setup in the video with some discussion around each component.

Click here to watch the video!

If you are running into any issues check out my video and you can see how my domain, grids, etc. are all setup. I think that will answer most questions and will give you a good understanding of exactly what this solution provides.

~Lane