On Monday 25 August 2008 20:02:59 Soren Hansen wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 06:12:08PM +0200, Kern Sibbald wrote:
> > If you have time available, I personally would prefer to see a new
> > Bacula driver written using the S3 API, which as far as I can tell
> > would be system independent.
>
> It would, yes.
>
> > A SCSI driver is something that you have to install in your OS, and as
> > such is highly OS dependent, so would be available only on systems
> > that have such a "module" for them.  In addition, Bacula's SCSI
> > interface will not co-exist well with S3 since when Bacula is writing
> > to a tape (using the open/read/write/ioctl/close SCSI interface), it
> > expects the device to behave like a tape.  S3 is more like a
> > filesystem.  If one did succeed in such an endeavor, the advantage
> > would be that there should be no changes to Bacula.
>
> It *is* more like a filesystem, but still not actually *like* a
> filesystem. E.g. you don't have the concept of directories, but you have
> a much more extensible concept of metadata. You can't open files
> read-write, and AFAIK you can only upload and download entire files, so
> while a filesystem driver for S3 could emulate seeking, it'd be costly.

If they indeed do it that way, then either Bacula would need to transfer full 
volumes, or divide Bacula Volumes into a number of smaller files on S3, and 
upload or download files as if they were Bacula blocks all of which would be 
more work than just writing a Bacula driver that uses http to read/write 
files.

>
> > If I am not mistaken, S3 does already have an interface that works
> > through normal file open/read/write/lseek/close which would be
> > compatible with Bacula's disk (or File) driver.  It *should* work, but
> > it might be much less satisfactory (less well integrated with S3) than
> > a real S3 driver.
>
> Agreed.



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