Hello, fellow perl monks. I have a question for the wise ones! I have a small mail server I use to supply email for familly, friends and myself. Nothing serious, so I have never really had any true backups. The server I can setup quickly since it is bare bones setup just to do mail and act as a firewall. Only thing important on it is the email messages and some webpages.

I want to write a perl script to automate the process. I have written a preliminary script to backup selected mail accounts to a zip drive.

Questions I have:

1. Can I run this from cron without opening some security hole on my server
2. I was unsure about how to be sure that Im not backing up the file while the mail program (EXIM) is updating the spool. I checked exims docs it doesnt mention anything. Do I just need to use flock??
3. Any suggestion!

Here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# simple script to backup specified mail accounts
# to a zip disk.
use strict;

my $zip_drive   =  "/dev/hdc4";
my $mnt_dir     =  "/mnt";
my $tmp_dir     =  "/tmp/";
my $bkup_root   =  "/var/spool/mail/";
my @bkups       = (
                    'kirk',
                    'spock',
                    'mrmister',
                    'you'               
                   );
my $todays_date  = join '-', (('jan','feb','mar','apr','may','jun',
             'jul','aug','sep','oct','nov','dec')[(localtime)[4]]),
             ((localtime)[3]),
             ((localtime)[5]+1900);
             
$ENV{PATH} = "/bin:/usr/bin";

print "Mounting zip drive for backup...\n";

die "Couldn't mount zip drive: $?\n" if 
          system ("mount","-t","vfat",$zip_drive,$mnt_dir);

my $old_dir = `pwd`;
chomp $old_dir;

chdir "$bkup_root" or 
          die "Can't change working directory to [$bkup_root]: $!\n";

foreach my $bkup (@bkups){
          my $arch = "$tmp_dir$bkup-$todays_date.tar";
          if (system("tar","-cvvf",$arch,$bkup)){
               warn "Could not tar file [$bkup]:$!\n";
               next;
          }else { 
               print "File has been tarred.\n";
               if (system("gzip","-9",$arch)){
                    warn "Could not gzip file [$arch]:$!\n";
             }else {
                    print "File has been gziped.\n";
               if (system("mv","$arch.gz","$mnt_dir/mail/")){
                    warn "Could not move file from temp directory",
                         " to zip drive: $!\n";
               }else{
                    print "File has been moved to zip drive for"
                          " backup\n";
               }
              
             }
      }
}

chdir $old_dir or 
          die "Can't restore working directory to [$old_dir].\n";
          
print "Unmounting zip drive...\n";
die "Couldn't unmount zip drive: $?\n" if system ("umount",$mnt_dir);
print "\nZip disk can be removed.\n";
[download]

Thanks for any suggestions!!
zzspectrez

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