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
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