AMANDA-INTERACTIVIT(7)

📦
version 3.5.4 · 8 versions
, in ubuntu stonking

💖 AMANDA-INTERACTIVIT ✨

okay bestie, welcome to the amanda-interactivity page — it's a Miscellanea situation and it's literally all about Configuring Interactivity with Amanda Amanda (yes, it says Amanda twice, that's canon, we don't question the queen). 🎀

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so here's the vibe: Amanda is interactive. when it needs a specific volume to show up, it literally asks a human to go load it. this page is the tell-all on the interactivity modules that ship with Amanda. 🦋

important deets: this is the user-level description of the API. it does NOT go into the stuff that only matters to people writing brand-new interactivity plugins. if that's your era, go read the Amanda source code, run perldoc 'Amanda::Interactivity', and hit up http://wiki.zmanda.com. iykyk. 💅

🌸 DEFINING INTERACTIVITY 🌸

you set this up in amanda.conf(5) like so:

define interactivity $interactivity_name {
   comment "$comment"
   plugin "$pluginname"
   property "$PROPERTY_NAME" "$PROPERTY_VALUE"
   ...
}

and then you reference it in the global section, like:

  interactivity "$interactivity_name"

quick lil heads-up: interactivity properties are just like Amanda config parameters — case doesn't matter, and - (dash) and _ (underscore) are fully interchangeable. they're the same thing, no cap. 🫶

each plugin's own properties are down below in their own little sections. scroll, bestie. ⬇️

👑 INTERACTIVITY MODULES 👑

Amanda gives you three modules, and they ate: tty, email, and tty_email. let's go one by one. 💜

🖥️ TTY

the tty module talks to the user straight through the tty. it only works if a terminal is available — which is the case when Amanda is run from a command line. 🌈

when it prompts you for a volume, you pop the requested volume into the changer and press Enter. you can also type the name of a different changer if the volume happens to live there. and if you type 'abort'? the whole operation gets aborted. periodt. 💀

📧 EMAIL

the email module sends requests to the user by email and reads the replies back from the filesystem. iconic, honestly. ✨

it's got a whole collection of properties:

  • check-file — if this is set, Amanda will check this file for user input. the user can touch the file to tell Amanda the requested volume got inserted into the changer. if the user writes the name of a changer into the file, Amanda will use that changer. and if the user writes the word 'abort' into the file, the scan gets aborted. 🛑
  • check-file-delay — default: 10. this integer property is the time in seconds between each check of the check-file. ⏱️
  • mailto — default: the global value of mailto. these are the email addresses the email gets sent to. if you're giving multiple addresses, separate them with spaces. 📬
  • resend-delay — default 0. the time in seconds between emails. Amanda will resend the same email at this frequency, which is lowkey useful if mailto is a pager or a phone. if it's set to 0, only one email is sent. 🔁

🦋 TTY_EMAIL

the tty_email module is the best of both worlds: it uses the tty module if a terminal is available, and falls back to the email module otherwise. its properties are just a combination of the properties from each module. slay. 👑

💅 EXAMPLE 💅

  define interactivity "by-tty-or-email" {
    comment "Send email on runs from cron; use terminal on command line"
    plugin "tty_email"
    property "mailto" "admin1" "admin2" "me@home"
    property "resend-delay" "1800"               #every 30 minutes
    property "check-file" "/tmp/email_input"
    property "check-file-delay" "10"             #every 10 seconds
  }

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

The Amanda Wiki: : http://wiki.zmanda.com/ (yes the double colon is really there, we love her 🎀)

💖 AUTHOR 💖

Jean-Louis Martineau <martineau@zmanda.com>

Zmanda, Inc. (http://www.zmanda.com)

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🥳 this was Amanda 3.5.4, dated 08/26/2026, and it lives at AMANDA-INTERACTIVIT(7). go forth and be interactive, mwah 💋🫶🌸

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