To backup a bunch of separate volumes used on a SAN, I'd suggest perhaps 
switching to one the following (although there may be other options or 
combinations that could be set up I dunno)...

1) put your bacula-sd on one host and NFS mount the volumes from the 
other servers
2) put bacula client (bacula-fd) software on each node and pick one host 
to run the bacula-sd
3) use some sort of snapshot software that lets you mount the snapshot 
of each filesystem on a single backup server, then run the -sd and -fd 
on that machine
4) Is there any possibility you could run the bacula-sd directly on the 
SAN?  Generally not with bigger ones due to support concerns but perhaps 
you can get something cool to develop like a bacula partnership with a 
smaller san company.  I used to be involved with an EMC Clariion SAN and 
that ran on NT4 or NT3.51 or something like that, but it was strictly 
hands off with respect to the customers--they couldn't do anything other 
than use EMC tools to talk to it remotely.  Smaller vendors may be much 
more interested in helping out to develop something like that.

     Bob

> From: "Decaying Insect" <decaying.insect AT gmail DOT com>
> Subject: [Bacula-users] Bacula and shared autochangers
> To: bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
> Message-ID:
>       <7f69b01f0804160431j15857128n963e5bfd580b8914 AT mail.gmail DOT com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Hi
> 
> I'm using bacula-2.2.8 on some centos-5 machines.
> 
> Essentially, the situation is as follows: we have a small SAN with a couple
> of file-servers sharing an Overland Neo tape changer: that is to say the SAN
> is zoned into two zones, the tape changer and tape devices being present in
> each. The file-servers servers mount different disk volumes from the SAN,
> and there is no one machine which can see all the volumes across both SAN
> zones.
> 
> Our intention was to have bacula-dir connect to each file-server in turn,
> acquire the (shared) autochanger and tape resources, and back-up the disk
> volumes specific to that host's zone.
> 
> Unfortunately this does not seem to be possible: it appears that once a
> bacula-sd running on a particular file-server has acquired the autochanger
> device it is not subsequently released when that machine's back-ups have
> been completed and  the next machine's back-ups are scheduled: that is to
> say the second machine can never successfully issue 'mtx unload slot n'
>  while bacula-sd is running on the first machine ('mtx status' does,
> however, work)
> 
> Clearly there is some sort of low-level SCSI locking mechanism here: does
> anyone know of a work-around for this, short of re-doing disk volumes as
> GFS, placing them in both zones and mounting all of them on a single host?
> 
> 

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