samba - Jul 2000 - Backing up Win32 Clients over a network

I am trying to create a network wide backup scheme using Samba for a 
network of about 60 Win32 clients in our LAN.  I was wondering if it is 
possible to use smbclient to automatically search the entire network for 
shares with a common prefix naming convention and using a wildcard such as 
backup_*, automatically mount the shares, and use smbtar for backup 
purposes?  Has anyone done this before?  .

Chuck Siu



Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary 
three times as fast. -Peter Drucker (1909-)

Chuck Siu wrote:
> 
> I am trying to create a network wide backup scheme using Samba for a
> network of about 60 Win32 clients in our LAN.  I was wondering if it is
> possible to use smbclient to automatically search the entire network for
> shares with a common prefix naming convention and using a wildcard such as
> backup_*, automatically mount the shares, and use smbtar for backup
> purposes?  Has anyone done this before?  .
> 
If you are using Linux as your backup host, you might look at the
alternative of using smbfs.  That way, you mount the Win32 client shares
and they look just like native filesystems.  You can then use whatever
backup technique you like (I like afio, personally).  Not that smbfs
never has problems...

As far as the common prefix...  I guess you could have a script search
through /var/samba/browse.dat.