On 03/31/2016 11:07 AM, Phil Stracchino wrote: > No, Lloyd, I think you're misunderstanding Josh's suggestion. > > Let the user NFS hosts continue to automount their user home directories > over NFS, just as you are now. Don't change anything there. It's not > broke, don't "fix" it. > > But if the NAS supports iSCSI-target mode, export the entire shared > volume from the NAS as a single iSCSI target to the backup server, and > back up the NAS all at once over iSCSI without having to worry about > mounting and unmounting individual homedir shares or all of the > headaches that come with trying to back up over NFS.
Ah, I do see what you mean. Unfortunately, its not quite as simple as that. First, each user directory is an individual share or volume in ZFS parlance. They're thin-provisioned volumes, on top of a storage pool. Any export I do, be it NFS, iSCSI, CIFS, etc., would be done at that level, and not above. There is no way to do a system-wide export of any kind, over any protocol. I *might* be able to export individual shares via iSCSI, but I don't think so. I believe you have to choose at share creation time, which type it is going to be. And even if that was an option, then, at best, I still have to deal with on 1 iSCSI per user volume. The only system-wide blocks that are available, are the SAS-attached blocks between the disk trays and the NAS heads, which are aggregated into a ZFS pool; I doubt I'll be able to get those exported to the backup client, even if it was a good idea. And if I have to deal with one iSCSI mount per user, there's very little difference between doing that, and mounting them individually over NFS. Now, I haven't actually done any iSCSI stuff with bacula before, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I also doubt I could restore individual files from within the backups, if I used iSCSI. Accidental deletions are, by far, the most common scenario we need to restore for, and the number of files is relatively small. I don't really want to have to restore the user's entire homedir (could be up to 1TB), just to get at one or two files. Using a filesystem-based view, lets me do both a single-file restore, and a massive disaster recovery. Sorry I wasn't clear about those details before. My emails tend to be long already, and I didn't realize it would be relevant. -- Lloyd Brown Systems Administrator Fulton Supercomputing Lab Brigham Young University http://marylou.byu.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Transform Data into Opportunity. Accelerate data analysis in your applications with Intel Data Analytics Acceleration Library. Click to learn more. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=278785471&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
