[[!tag obnam announcement]]

I have just tagged Obnam (my backup program) 1.8 in git, and built and uploaded Debian packages to code.liw.fi and Debian unstable. NEWS snippet below.

Version 1.8, released 2014-05-13

  • The error message has been improved for when setting metadata (owner, permission, and similar) of a restored file fails.

  • obnam force-lock now works even when the client running it is not in the client list.

Security issues:

  • Joey Hess found a problem in obnam restore: restored files would be created with quite liberal default permissions, which would be set to the backed-up permissions later. This could allow a snooper to read files they shouldn't be. This has been fixed now by using restrictive default permissions. A workaround for older versions is to create a directory, set its permissions to 0700, and restore to a subdirectory of that directory.

Bug fixes:

  • --help output no longer shows the default value of any options. It was shown only for a few options anyway. The proper way to see the current settings is with the --dump-config option. The bug that was fixed that the generated manual page no longer contains values that are specific to the machine doing the generation, such as the hostname as the default value for --client-name. Reported by SanskritFritz.

  • When a file was backed up, and later excluded with --exclude, Obnam wouldn't remove it from the new backups. Now it does. Bug fixed by Anssi Hannula, though his patch got changed because it no longer applied.

  • When restoring extended attributes not in the user namespace (named like user.foo) Obnam now ignores them, instead of trying to set them and crashing.

  • When restoring from a directory that is not a repository, the error message is now clearer.

  • Obnam would previously allow the backup root to be a symbolic link pointing at a directory. However, this only worked for backups. No other operations would work and would only see the symbolic link, not the directory it pointed at. Obnam now gives an error message even for the backup.

  • Obnam no longer excludes files named syslog or none, if the setting --log=none or --log=syslog is used.