Showing posts with label cifs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cifs. Show all posts

Sunday, October 19, 2008

autofs

Install autofs (yum install autofs), then follow the link below
Auto-mounting the NAS using autofs -
Accessing Windows Or Samba Shares Using AutoFS
add an entry for the NAS in /etc/hosts

Something fundamental I've missed is that autofs gets the key on demand.
so -
[user@localhost ~]$ ll /cifs
total 0

which isn't promising... but

[user@localhost ~]$ ll /cifs/DLINK-EEF76A/
total 0
drwxrwxrwx 24 user user 0 2008-10-16 01:43 Volume_1
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 2008-10-20 19:21 web_page

is what we want :)

A symbolic link simplifies access -
sudo ln -s /cifs/DLINK-EEF76A /mnt/nas

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Backup of Aspire One to DNS-323

I want to backup my Aspire One to my DNS-323 NAS, there are a plethora of ways to do this, so I thought I'd evaluate them here.

The following methods came to mind immediately -
- copy the whole hard disk/partition image (ghost style)
- copy at a file level, rsync style

Initially I like the whole image method. It speeds up the recovery process, and with a Linux style implementation, it's probably possible to loop mount the image, if one just wants to recover some files anyway. Or would this require 120GB or RAM? :)

The first obstacle of the image method is that you probably need to have the file system either not mounted or mounted read-only. This could be a hassle - I certainly don't want to have to boot on an external drive to perform a backup... but maybe dropping down to single user mode would be ok.

It's worth noting that the Aspire one comes with a recovery DVD (bootable via external drive or copy to USB key), that can restore the system to it's factory install. This should be a reasonable starting point for then restoring changed applications/data/configuration from the backup mechanisms evaluated here.

Partimage
Well I liked the look of partimage, and decided to start here. Rather than setup partimaged on the NAS, it seems mounting the filesystem was an easier way to go. See below -

[user@localhost ~]$ su - Password:
[root@localhost ~]# modprobe cifs
[root@localhost ~]# mkdir /mnt/nas
[root@localhost ~]# mount -t cifs //192.168.1.10/Volume_1 /mnt/nas
Password:
[root@localhost ~]# wget "http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/partimage/partimage-static-0.6.5-1.rh7.rf.i386.rpm"

[root@localhost ~]# rpm -i partimage-static-0.6.5-1.rh7.rf.i386.rpm
warning: partimage-static-0.6.5-1.rh7.rf.i386.rpm: Header V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6b8d79e6
[root@localhost ~]# partimage-static


I then added an fstab entry for the partition
//192.168.1.10/Volume_1 /mnt/nas cifs auto,rw,user=guest,password=guest

but soon wandered off into issues with mounting it as a normal (non root user). For now I'm relying on sudo.
The big challenge is to unmount the root partition, or remount it in read-only mode, such that partimage can be safely used to produce a consistent image.

As the standard Linpus install only has one partition + swap, this challenge stumped me. The only options I see are unfortunately booting off external media, or doing some repartitioning. This is where I give up on this method for now.

Next I'll take a look at unison or rdiff-backup -
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/