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Subject: Star-1.5 source has been released
***************
Please have a look at the German open Source Center BerliOS at www.berlios.de
BerliOS will continue to support free hosting of cryptography projects even
when US laws change and don't allow to host cryptography projects in the USA.
Also look at sourcewell.berlios.de, the first Open Source announcement service
that itself is implemented as Open Source project.
***************
Star is the fastest tar archiver for UNIX
Star has many improvements compared to other tar
implementations (including gnu tar). See below for a short description
of the highlight of star.
Star is located on:
ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star
Changes since star-1.5.a08:
The first mid level step towards incremental backups was 1.5a02.
1.5a10 or 1.5a11 will have the needed features to do incremental dumps.
Later versions will include support for incremental restore.
- Auto-create dependencies for HP-UX bundled C-compiler
- Auto-create dependencies for AIX C-compiler
- Reworked 'librmt' now allows to use star in remote mode without
being installed suid root.
To force star to use rsh(1) instead of rcmd(3), use
env RSH=rsh star ...
To tell star to use a different RMT server, call
env RMT=/path/to/rmt star ....
NOTE: Transfer speed is much slower if star does not use rcmd(3)
in root mode to establish the remote connection. If you like to
do fast, always make sure to be root or install star suid root.
For now (late 2002), we know that the following programs
are broken and do not implement signal handling correctly:
rsh on SunOS-5.0...SunOS-5.9
ssh from ssh.com
ssh from openssh.org
Sun already did accept a bug report for 'rsh'. Meanwhile it could
help to call setsid() if we are running under X so the ssh
X pop up for passwd reading will work.
For Solaris the following Bug requests are open:
rsh/rlogin 4776756
sun ssh 4777436
The source from OpenSSH.org has been fixed on Monday 11.11.2002.
Due to the signal handling bug, star will die if you try to type
^\ (SIGQUIT) to get an intermediate status summary. Star will
also not be able to write the current file to a logical end before
stopping because it received a SIGINT - this will result in
archives with a defective logical structure.
- Reworked 'librmt' allows to use ssh(1) to be used for remote tape
access. Use
env RSH=ssh star ....
or
env RSH=/usr/bin/ssh star ....
to tell star to use the secure shell to establish a remote tape
connection. Note that using the secure shell causes the transfer
speed to be significantly lower than for the default case where
a suid root star used rcmd(3) to set up the connection.
- Man pages for librmt new.
- Include a patch from Andreas Gruenbacher to fix a problem with
illegal ACL comments in linux tar archives that caused star
to be unable to extract the archive.
- Fix a bug in create_dirs() that has been introduced with star-1.5a08.
The bug caused star to complain about not being able to extract a dir
if it did already exists.
- Add support for *BSD SIGINFO (SIGINFO has been added by BSD in 1990)
We do support intermediate status printing much longer but triggered
by SIGQUIT (^\).
- Major rework for "rmt" man page
- Make "rmt" return the string "PIPE" if "stdin" is connected to a pipe.
This allows to use ssh(1) for the remote tape interface.
- changes to reflect new interfaces of 'librmt'.
- 'mt' command renamed to 'smt' to allow it to be installed as
alternate mt program to be used for backup purposes
- follow the strange POSIX rules for the strerror() behavior
Revision history (short)
1982 First version on UNOS (extract only)
1985 Port to UNIX (fully functional version)
1985 Added pre Posix method of handling special files/devices
1986 First experiments with fifo as external process.
1993 Remote tape access
1993 diff option
1994 Fifo with shared memory integrated into star
1994 Very long filenames and sparse files
1994 Gnutar and Ustar(Posix.1-1988) handling added
1994 Xstar format (extended Posix.1-1988) defined and introduced
1995 Ported to many platforms
1999 Support for Win32 (Cygwin)
1999 base 256 support to overcome limitation with octal fields
2001 Large file support
2001 Support for POSIX.1-2001 extended headers
2001 Support for ACLs in POSIX.1-2001 extended headers
2002 Support for extended file flags in POSIX.1-2001 extended headers
2002 Support for extended inode meta data and meta files
Supported platforms:
Virtually any! Known to work:
SunOS 4.x, Solaris (SunOS 5.x), Linux,
HP-UX, DG/UX, IRIX, AIX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD,
OSF-1, True-64, QNX, BeOS, Apollo Domain/OS, Next-STep,
OS/2, SCO-openserver, SCO-unixware, Caldera OpenUnix,
Cygwin (Win32), Sony NewsOS, BSDi (BSD/OS), QNX,
Apple Rhapsody, MacOS X, AmigaOS, GNU Hurd
Joerg
-------------------------------------------------------------
Star is the fastest known implementation of a tar archiver.
Star is able to make backups with far more than 10MB/s if the
disk and tape drive support such a speed. This is more than
double the speed that ufsdump will get.
In 1996, Ampex got 13.5 MB/s with their DLT tape drive which is a
modified professional digital video tape drive and not related
to Quantum's DLT type drives.
Ufsdump got a maximum speed of about 6MB/s with the same hardware.
Star development started 1982, the first complete implementation has
been done in 1985. I never did my backups with other tools than star.
Its main advantages over other tar implementations are:
fifo - keeps the tape streaming.
This gives you faster backups than
you can achieve with ufsdump, if the
size of the filesystem is > 1 GByte.
remote tape support - a fast RMT implementation that has no
probems to saturate a 100 Mb/s network.
accurate sparse files - star is able to reproduce holes in sparse
files accurately if the OS includes
the needed support functions. This is
currently true for Solaris-2.3 to
Solaris-2.5.1
pattern matcher - for a convenient user interface
(see manual page for more details).
To archive/extract a subset of files.
sophisticated diff - user tailorable interface for comparing
tar archives against file trees
This is one of the most interesting parts
of the star implementation.
no namelen limitation - Pathnames up to 1024 Bytes may be archived.
(The same limitation applies to linknames)
This limit may be expanded in future
without changing the method to record
long names.
deals with all 3 times - stores/restores all 3 times of a file
(even creation time)
With POSIX.1-2001 the times are in nanosecond
granularity.
Star may reset access time after doing
backup. On Solaris this can be done without
changing the ctime.
does not clobber files - more recent copies on disk will not be
clobbered from tape
This may be the main advantage over other
tar implementations. This allows
automatically repairing of corruptions
after a crash & fsck (Check for differences
after doing this with the diff option).
automatic byte swap - star automatically detects swapped archives
and transparently reads them the right way
automatic format detect - star automatically detects several common
archive formats and adopts to them.
Supported archive types are:
Old tar, gnu tar, ansi tar, star,
POSIX.1-2001 PAX, Sun's Solaris tar.
automatic compression detect - star automatically detects whether the
archive is compressed. If it has been
compressed with a compression program that
is compatible to decompression with "gzip"
or "bzip2", star automatically activates
decompression.
fully ansi compatible - Star is fully ANSI/Posix 1003.1 compatible.
See README.otherbugs for a complete
description of bugs found in other tar
implementations. Star is the first tar
implementation that supports POSIX.1-2001.
support for ACLs and file flags - star supports Access Control Lists
and extended file flags (as found on FreeBSD
and Linux). Support to archive and restore
other file properties may be easily added.
support for all inode metadata - star supports to put all inode
metadata on the archive. This allows future
versions of star to perform true
incremental dumps.
Have a look at the manual page, it is included in the distribution.
Author:
Joerg Schilling
Seestr. 110
D-13353 Berlin
Germany
Email: joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de, js@cs.tu-berlin.de
schilling@fokus.gmd.de
Please mail bugs and suggestions to me.
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