CS615A -- Aspects of System Administration

EC2 Backup

Summary:

The objective of this assignment is for you to create a tool able to perform a backup of a given directory to a data storage device in the cloud. In the process, you will (hopefully) learn a few things about writing modular system tools, about command pipelining, the use of some common commands, and gain some insights into a cloud-based storage model.

The detailed specification of the program can be found in this manual page.

This assignment is worth 50 points.

Target platform

The tool you write will be executed (and graded) on an AWS EC2 NetBSD instance of type ami-569ed93c. You are free to develop it in some other environment, but please make sure to test it on this instance type before submitting it. If it does not work on these hosts, you will not get any points.

Programming language

You are free to choose any programming language you like to implement this tool. If your tool requires any packages to be installed, please ensure that your Makefile installs them.

After running 'make install', the user should be able to run your command by invoking '/usr/local/bin/ec2-backup'.

Program behaviour and safe assumptions

Your program will not require any modification of the environment (i.e., you can assume the user has his/her environment set up for EC2), and exection of the program will be exactly as outlined in the manual page ec2-backup(1).

In addition to what the manual page notes, you may further assume the following:

• the default EC2 security group of the invoking user allows any and all connections to instances placed in that group
• the instance has been bootstrapped for AWS usage via this script

Notes

Review the feedback you got for HW2; apply it and ensure that your program improves on that prototype.

You may choose to implement the programs in any way you like, including breaking it down into smaller individual tools, scripts or programs.

You probably want to make sure that your program exhibits the various features of good software engineering practices we discussed. Please make sure to consider these and have your submission reflect wherever possible.

It is in your interest to accompany your submission with some commentary on why you chose the programming language, the approach you took, any considerations you might have. The more thought I see you put into the assignment, the better.

You may use code you find on the internet if and only if you explicitly note which parts are not your own and the code in question is licensed such that you can use it in this manner.

This is not a trivial assignment. Please do not delay starting to work on it.

Deliverables and Due Date

You will submit a single tar(1) archive. The file to submit will be called "$USER-ec2-backup.tar" (where "$USER" is your Stevens username). The archive will extract all files and subdirectories into a directory named $USER.

You will only submit source files -- no binaries or executables of any kind -- as well as a mandatory Makefile as well as your README.

The following is an example sequence of commands to create a valid homework submission:

mkdir $USER
cd $USER
vi README
vi ec2-backup
[code code code]
cd ..
tar cf $USER-ec2-backup.tar $USER

The due date for this assignment is 2019-04-08 16:00 EDT. Please attach the file to an email sent from your @stevens.edu email address to jschauma@stevens.edu with a subject of "[CS615] HW5".