mount remote drive

[techguy]

Hi.
First time posting having been using Freenas for awhile and upto now have been able to figure most things out.
freenas 8.2
What I want to do is to be able to have freenas run a cron job that will backup the files to a simple network drive (not my only backup) running through a samba server.
I figured use the CLI create a folder use mount_smbfs and treat it like a normal drive through the gui.
doesn't work. in fact using the mount_smbfs hangs the whole system and I have to force a restart.
What have I missed?
Is it possible and if so anyone care to show me how?

Cheers
David.

 

[jgreco]

A remote Samba server? That adds some undesirable complexity to things. Why not just turn on rsyncd on the Samba server and shove at it with rsync?

 

[techguy]

A remote Samba server? That adds some undesirable complexity to things. Why not just turn on rsyncd on the Samba server and shove at it with rsync?

Doesn't support rsync.
the remote drive it self is a USB drive connected through a vantec file-server. Its fairly basic system that contains a basic file-server, ftp server and print server.
What are some of the undesirable complexity's you're referring too?

 

[jgreco]

FreeNAS is designed assuming that it doesn't have remote file storage dependencies. Breaking design assumptions is always risky. Adding a remote mountpoint to a system that wasn't intended to host them could cause problems, such as hangs if the remote fileserver goes away or has a problem.

It might be worthwhile to see if you can make use of an FTP script to do your backup, relatively safer.

 

[techguy]

I've actually been able to do it and frankly it was way easier then expected.
create a directory in /mnt
mount_smbfs -I <ip-address> -W Workgroup "//username@<ip-address>/Backup" /mnt/Backup
rsync -rv "/mnt/freenas" "/mnt/Backup"
some difficulty with .nsmbrc and the password sorting that out now
Also placing it all in a script and going to run through cron

 

[jgreco]

Well, glad to hear that worked out. Any idea why it hung when you first tried to do that?

 

[techguy]

Yes the device I was using to connect the usb drive, a Vantex Nexstar file server SUXS.
Every time a large file was transferred it froze the whole network.
Swapped to another network drive and mounted, ran and transferred with no issues.

Now trying to get s3rsync to work. and looking at s3fs maybe......

 

[awheewall]

...Now trying to get s3rsync to work. and looking at s3fs maybe......

Did you have any joy with getting S3Rsync working with FreeNAS?

 

[alfons sanchez]

I have a different solution.
I Have a machine with the ram needed for freenas plus 1 gb. 1 USB pen drive 3.0 4Gb for ESXi 6.0 and 4 hdd's in raid 10 (with a vmware compatible RAID controller card), and 2 or more NIC's in NIC-Teaming for balancing

One virtual machine with 1 virtual disc about 4 gb and a 1 virtual disc as big as needed (thin provisioning) for the FREENAS.

Other virtual machine in Debian 64 bit. one virtual disc for /, other for /home and other for swap.
The Debian machine has installed webadmin and all tools I need.
It also has mounted as NFS volumes in the freenas and volumes in the seccond NAS for bakups.
If USB drive is needed, you can add the device to the debian VM int the ESXi with passtrought and autoconnect configuration and mount it in the fstab.

The machine which makes backups and whatever you want is the debian. Via ssh or http (webmin).

Its also possible to install a GUI and the X2GO server in the debian (I like plasma 5) and connect via ssh with X2GO client.

Other possibility is a windows 64 bit virtual machine instead of the Debian. And perform back up with veeam backup. It makes incremental backups (reverse if needed) at the disc sector level. Not files.
But it's not free.

ESXi + Freenas + Debian is a really good team.