Requirements for TapiocaStor

©2001 The TapiocaStor Group

Contents

• 1 Development Requirements
  • 1.1 General Requirements
  • 1.2 Documentation Tools
  
  
• 2 General Requirements
• 3 Special Requirements
• About this document ...

1 Development Requirements

1.1 General Requirements

1. All tools used must be freely available (or have freely available equivalents) on both Unix/Linux and Windows.
2. Development languages used should be common and widely used.
3. The entire project, including the web site, must be able to be automatically generated and posted without user intervention (other than possibly typing in an 'ssh' password).
4. No Python will be used due to various intellectual property issues stemming from prior employment of some core team members.

1.2 Documentation Tools

1. All documentation must be able to be converted both to HTML and to Postscript (and/or PDF).
2. All documentation conversions must be able to be done under script control on at least Linux.
3. All documentation tools must be freely available on both Windows and Unix/Linux.

Ramifications:

1. StarOffice is not acceptable because StarOffice documents cannot be converted to HTML under script control.
2. DocBook SGML is not acceptable due to lack of availability on Windows. (LaTeX is available everywhere, ugly as it is).
3. Microsoft Office is ruled out entirely (does not run on Unix).
4. LyX is not easily available on Windows, thus has been eliminated as a word processor (sigh).
5. WordPerfect and Applix Office are not freely available.

For lack of any other cross-platform documentation solution, we're stuck with what the Python library documenters are stuck with: plain old LaTeX.

2 General Requirements

1. Must operate in a secure manner.
2. Must authenticate users with all info needed in order to enforce security.
3. Must be able to back up any system on the network to any backup device on the network, if user has proper authentication.
4. Must be able to restore files from any backup device on the network to any system on the network, if the user has permission to do so.
5. Must be able to control the backup process from any console anywhere on the network, if user has proper ID and password.
6. All passwords passed over the network must be encrypted to secure them from eavesdroppers.
7. All communications passed over the network must be encryptable to secure them from eavesdroppers.
8. End users must be able to restore their own files without operator intervention (other than perhaps shoving a tape into the drive).
9. Backups must be schedulable and able to run without user intervention except in case of things like tape changes.
10. Must support a large number of possible data sources (e.g., filesystems, database dump streams, NDMP streams, etc.) and data sinks (e.g. tape drives, optical disks, disk files, etc.).
11. Must be modular in nature so that additional requirements can be easily met without major redesign.
12. A central data store must maintain a list of all backups and their contents for easy retrieval. (SQL preferred, due to ease of querying it).

3 Special Requirements

1. Must be able to back up a system to a tape drive ASAP, even before the communications components are completed ('ssh' or some other mechanism can be used as a temporary substitute).

About this document ...

Requirements for TapiocaStor

This document was generated using the LaTeX2HTML translator Version 2K.1beta (1.47)

Copyright © 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, Nikos Drakos, Computer Based Learning Unit, University of Leeds.
Copyright © 1997, 1998, 1999, Ross Moore, Mathematics Department, Macquarie University, Sydney.

The command line arguments were:
latex2html -local_icons -no_auto_link -no_subdir -split 0 -show_section_numbers Requirements.tex

The translation was initiated by The Unknown Hacker on 2001-07-01