Yet another update to the bacula client (and bconsole) for Mac OS X. System requirements and upgrade process are the same as with 2.4.0.
Enjoy!
bacula-client-242-1
Recently I came upon the need to do all my network routing and firewalling inside a Xen domU. I am not the first to do this but I thought I’d do a little write up on it to help others trying to accomplish the same thing in Debian.
The idea here is to end up with (at least) two VLANs on the network with the dom0 and domU’s being able to choose one or both networks on which to exist. In the case of both, you can set up a handy domU firewall/gateway :)
As you can see from the diagram above, we will end up with three bridges in the dom0 with all the appropriate glue to tie everything together. Best of all, this is all assembled on the fly during bootup.
This wasnt incredibly difficult to figure out, but if you have a Debian etch system with iscsi-target compiled from source (as I regularly do) getting both open-iscsi and iscsi-target to play nice together takes a small amount of fiddling.
Binaries for the latest bacula-fd and bconsole have been updated. Upgrades from previous versions should be handled in an intelligent fashion.
Please report any issues and I will resolve them ASAP. Thanks and enjoy!
The final installment of our coraid adventure and not really much to say other than this: it works! Hotplug support is working as of kernel 2.6.25-git11 and appears to function as it should.
Thanks go to Mark Lord, Marvell Corporation, EMC Corporation and Red Hat, Inc. for the coding magic.
The next phase of this project is choosing AoE or iSCSI. The debate on the relative merits of each protocol continues to rage on the Internet but in my particular case the criteria are pretty simple; which one performs better without causing excessive system load? Just from reading about the two protocols I am already leaning toward iSCSI for the simple fact that I can use all my TCP/IP management tools (routing, NAT, firewalling, etc.) on every iSCSI device. The only (potential) drawback is CPU load on the involved systems since it has to calculate TCP checksums for all those packets. Yes, there are many, many other advantages of one protocol over the other. No, they don’t matter to me in this scenario :-) So here we go!
On the plate today is getting ethernet interface bonding working to provide load balancing and failover on the dual onboard gigabit interfaces on our home-built Coraid.
This actually turns out to be much easier than expected…
Continue reading ‘Coraid Odyssey: Part 4 (ethernet bonding)’
Performance and failure testing are next up in building our kickin’ iSCSI/AoE device.
The Debian Etch installer supports building and installing onto software RAID arrays. Because of that…
Continue reading ‘Coraid Odyssey: Part 3 (performance testing)’
Todays adventure with building a SAN on the cheap involves attempting to get hotplug working and changing device mappings.
First of all, hotplug. I have discovered that…
AoE (ATA over Ethernet) and iSCSI are the hot new things. Xen is the hot new thing. I like using hot new things as long as they can be made rock solid.
There happens to be a company (Coraid) that makes a turnkey AoE device. Its far cheaper than a true fibre channel SAN or something similar. Perfect for setting up a SAN over Ethernet device that can serve Xen domU filesystems out to “thin” dom0’s on the network.
Well that’s all well and good but you see I’m always looking to save a buck…
Continue reading ‘Coraid Odyssey: Part 1 (building the chassis)’