Enhancing Security and Scalability in Backup Solutions with Amanda 2.5

Amanda is the world's most popular open source backup and recovery software. Amanda allows system administrators to set up a single server to back up multiple hosts to a tape- or disk-based storage system over the network. It uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large number of workstations or servers running various versions of Linux, Unix, Mac OS-X or Microsoft Windows operating systems. On March 23rd, 2006, the Amanda team released a major version (2.5) of the software. Overall the focus of the release is on security of the backup process & backed up data, scalability of the backup process and ease of installation & configuration of Amanda.

Recently security of the backup process has been a hotly discussed topic. Encryption of data across the network as well as while being stored on backup media is critical for privacy concerns and compliance requirements. New security features in Amanda 2.5 help administrators to address these issues. Amanda 2.5 brings additional support for Kerberos 4/5 and OpenSSH. This allows Amanda to protect the transfer of data between clients and backup server with strong authentication- and authorization-mechanisms. The new release also features an abstracted secure communication API that will allow developers to easily add different communication plugins between backup server and client.

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