Subsections


GUI Programs

List of GUI Programs

This document briefly describes the GUI programs that work with Bacula. The GUI programs that are currently available are:

bat
bat is short for Bacula Administration Tool. It is a GUI form of bconsole, but with many additional features. Although we are still working on adding new features to bat, at this point, it has more features than both bwx-console and the bgnome-console, and over time many additional features will be added, including the functionality of the tray-monitor as well as the reporting capabilities of bweb.

It is very difficult to provide a guide for using bat other than to say to try it. In many of the graphical display "panes" (shown in the right window), you can click with the right mouse button to bring up a context sensitive menu that provides quite a lot of features that can be easily missed.

The Bacula wiki has a number of screenshots of bat.

To build bat, you will need to have Qt4 >= 4.2 loaded (libraries and the devel libraries) as well as the QWT graphics package. Please see the enable-bat section of the Installation chapter of this manual for the details of how to build it.

The major bat features are:

Bat also has a nice online help manual that explains a lot of the interface.

bimagemgr
Bimagemgr is a web based interface written in Perl that monitors disk Volumes intended to be written to CDROM.

For more information on bimagemgr, please see below.

bwx-console
bwx-console is a graphical console interface written in wxWidgets and available on all client platforms. bwx-console allows you to do anything you can do in the standard tty console and in addition has a graphic tree based point and click restore feature.

bgnome-console
The bgnome-console is a graphical console interface available on systems that support GNOME 2.x. Although it runs in its own graphical window and permits all the standard console commands, it has almost no additional graphical features implemented.

For more information on bgnome-console, please consult the Console Chapter of this manual.

tray-monitor
The tray-monitor is a daemon monitoring program that resides in the system tray on GNOME and KDE systems. It is a monitor program that will show you the status of any daemon. It is not a program for interfacing to the console.

For more information, please see Configuring the Monitor Program chapter this manual.

bweb
Bweb is a perl based web program that provides a tool to do basic operations and get statistics. (it requires Bacula >= 1.39) It obtains its information from your catalog database and the bconsole program.

Some of its major features are the following:

  1. Follow, in real time, job progression (with client status and job log)
  2. See Pool/Media occupation
  3. Update volume parameters
  4. Manage locations (with a workflow to move in/out media)
  5. Get graphic statistics about jobs (file number, job size, job duration)
  6. Get csv group statistics for servers
  7. Run a new job
  8. Re-run a failed job with the same options (pool, level, etc.)
  9. Manage easily failed and missed jobs (with non-event detection)
  10. Manage your autochanger (put cartridge on I/O, empty I/O slots with free slots, etc.)
  11. Creates interactive map of concentric, segmented rings that help visualise disk usage on your backups.
  12. Define users
  13. Works with both PostgreSQL and MySQL
  14. Works correctly under Mozilla and Firefox

Please, read the INSTALL file in the bweb source directory for detailed instructions on getting it to work.

brestore
Brestore is a graphical restoration interface available on systems that support Perl/GTK/Glade. (it requires Bacula >= 1.38) It has the following features:

  1. Direct SQL access to the database for good performance
  2. Fast Time Navigation (switch almost instantaneously between the different versions of a directory, by changing the date from a list)
  3. Possibility to choose a selected file, then browse all its available versions, and directly see if these versions are online in a library or not
  4. Simple restoration by generation of a BSR file
  5. Works with both PostgreSQL and MySQL
  6. Works with bweb to follow job

Please, read README file in the bweb source directory for detailed instructions on getting it to work.

bacula-web
Bacula-web is a php based web program that provides a summarized output of jobs that have already run. It obtains its information from your catalog database. Aside from a nice graphical display, it provides summaries of your jobs, as well as graphs of job usage. This is a fairly high level bacula management tool.

Here are a few points that one user made concerning this tool:

  1. It is web-based so can be accessed from anywhere.
  2. It is "read only". Users can examine the state of the backups but cannot write to anything and therefore can do no damage.
  3. It packs a phenomenal amount of information into a single web-page - that I credit as being very good design!

The documentation for bacula-web can be found in a separate bacula-web document that in the bacula-docs release.

Kern Sibbald 2009-07-19