How To Install amanda-server on Kali Linux

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install amanda-server on Kali Linux.

What is amanda-server

amanda-server is:

Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many computers on a
network to a single large-capacity tape drive. This package is
suitable for large amounts of data to backup. For smaller solutions
take a look at afbackup, tob, …

Features:

• will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting
  finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as they can be written to
  tape. For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host
  with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours.
• built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, and
  later GNU Tar and others.
• does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.
• supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily customizable
  to any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled
  via the unix command line.
• for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper
  backup image on the tape for you.
• recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
• reports results, including all errors in detail, in email to operators.
• will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints:
  no more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
• includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on both
  the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel), and will
  send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause the backups to
  fail.
• can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with
  either compress or gzip.
• can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large
  timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system
  is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active
  filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
• lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.

For important notes, see /usr/share/doc/amanda-server/README.Debian.

Explanation of suggested programs:

• perl is needed for some non essential server utilities
• gnuplot is needed for plotting statistics of backups
• to backup the tape server, you need to install the client too

There are three methods to install amanda-server on Kali Linux. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install amanda-server Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install amanda-server using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install amanda-server

Install amanda-server Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install amanda-server using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install amanda-server

Install amanda-server Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude on Kali Linux first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Kali Linux. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install amanda-server using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install amanda-server

How To Uninstall amanda-server on Kali Linux

To uninstall only the amanda-server package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove amanda-server

Uninstall amanda-server And Its Dependencies

To uninstall amanda-server and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Kali Linux, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove amanda-server

Remove amanda-server Configurations and Data

To remove amanda-server configuration and data from Kali Linux we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge amanda-server

Remove amanda-server configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove amanda-server configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge amanda-server

Dependencies

amanda-server have the following dependencies:

• amanda-common

References

• amanda-server website

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install amanda-server package on Kali Linux using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.