Ready! Set! .....Detour!

Well, this has been an interesting couple of weeks. I recently got a bunch of time off that was use/lose, so I burned some of it working on my tape setup. Which, frankly, got a lot easier once I gave up on it being contained within the TrueNas system.

It started when I first decided to buckle down and take the route of having the TrueNas system pass through the fiber card to a local VM that would be hosting bacula*, based on the recommendation of the original post. So I started going down that route well noting that I would probably have to reinstall bacula* multiple times since I was going to screw up something somewhere. Luckily, I didn't make it that far. 

Turns out, that after 3-4 attempts of getting a VM up and running. There's a bug in the hardware/software that prevents me from correctly running a VM on the TrueNas server. I'm not sure what the issue is, nor did I dig too far into it, Instead I opt'd to move the fiber card from the TrueNas server to my backup Proxmox server, which was just sitting there shutdown, and "unused". This allowed me to do several things, first being that I could properly fire up a VM, second being that I could shutdown the physical hardware if needed without effecting the rest of the homelab, and third it allowed me to experiment with network setup on the VM (I.E which VLAN to put it on) without having the NAS server become unavailable. 

Once I shifted gears to use a VM on the backup Proxmox, things got significantly easier. First I had to figure out how to pass a card to the VM, which turns out was a couple of clicks and a "decision" that this VM is the only one that can use the card, or in other words, that the link was dedicated to the VM. There was a mention in the setup about being able to share the card with other devices, but I didn't think was necessary, as I dont need other VMs/Hosts changing the state of the tapedeck. 

Once I got the OS installed, and the card forwarding, I installed, and started using Bacula*, which seems pretty straight-forward. The biggest issue I have currently is that I'm S.M.A.R.T. and configuring the job based on the entire 7.5TB** fileset, instead of taking a sample and working off the sample. So each run is taking 24+ hours to complete before I get to see the results, and wither the run worked or not. This has lead to the tapedeck running, pretty much, constantly for the last week or so. Which is a good stress test, is not good for the temperature of my office, nor the NAS, as it keeps having to repeatedly transfer 7.5TB over the network to the new VM. 

But All-in-all, I've made progress, and learned some new stuff, both of which are good. Now I just need to learn patience, as I continue tweaking the fileset to only grab the things I care about. 

*Technically I'm using Bacularis, not Bacula

**Currently 7.5TB down from 10TB as I figured out how to exclude cache directories