Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.misc,alt.os.linux,alt.sys.sun,bln.comp.sun,bln.comp.unix,comp.os.linux.development.apps,comp.os.linux.misc,comp.sys.hp.apps,comp.sys.hp.misc,comp.sys.sgi.admin,comp.sys.sgi.apps,comp.sys.sgi.misc,comp.sys.sun.admin,comp.sys.sun.apps,comp.sys.sun.misc,comp.unix.aix,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.solaris,de.comp.os.linux.misc,de.comp.os.unix,linux.dev.admin,linux.dev.apps,maus.os.linux,maus.os.linux68k,maus.os.unix,uk.comp.os.linux Subject: Star-1.4 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-1.4.1: - Better autoconf tests for the content of sys/mtio.h - The Makefilesystem now creates include dependencies on HP-UX and AIX - Implement strange POSIX semantics for strerror() in comerr.c - printf() now correctly handles %X vs. %x on 64 bit machines Removed a 20 year old local extension that became non-portable. - star/remote.c now is 'librmt' - librmt now may be used by any external program like e.g. dump/restore to improve cross platform compatibility. - librmt implements much better cross platform compatibility for MT status - librmt now implements a non-root mode via rsh(1) instead of rcmd(3) Note that this is much slower than a rcmd(3) initiated - librmt now allows to use ssh(1) for remote tape access Note that this is even slower than with using rsh(1) - librmt now implements buffered reads for the protocol commands to improve performance. - 'mt' program renamed to 'smt' to allow installing it without replacing system's 'mt' - smt benefits from librmt and now gives platform independent 'mt status' output in remote mode. Before, the output was the least common denominator from 'struct mtget' os local and remote platform. - New option -wready for smt - Better man page for 'rmt' - rmt now implements the special string "PIPE" for the hostname if called from a pipe (e.g. because ssh was used). - Make star -wready work on Linux (using different error codes) too. - Flush verbose output before calling media change script - Check HAVE_READLINK in star - Handle a seek error problem in create mode correctly when checking for reading past max possible file size on non-large file OS. - Correctly propagate write/read errors from FIFO to star - Add support for SIGINFO (*BSD) as a courtesy to BSD users. We did implement ^\ for intermediate status from the mid 80s while *BSD introduced SIGINFO in 1990. - Do not open /dev/tty is a newvolume script is present. This allows to use star from cron scripts - Fixed a bug in the ACL handling code on Linux that caused star to recognize ACL comments as ACL entries and include them in the archive - Work around to allow star to read ACL enhanced archives that include bogus entries that really were ACL comments created by the bug above. 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 problems 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 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.