- Mac Pro “Kurumi” in the office
- iMac “Indy” in the office
- MacBook “Dawn” – everywhere
- MacBook “Hammy” – everywhere
- Mac mini “Belldandy” in the living room
- Mac mini “Saki” in the office

As both Mac minis are “just” used to playback videos (from the Nexenta server), TV (Sat) & Radio (Sat), I don’t think a backup makes any sense. So – still 4 Macs to backup left. On Debian it was a hassle to create new partitions now and oh – the backup pool (4x 1.5TB RAIDz1) was already created and data is stored onto.

Luckily, ZFS is a fantastic filesystem. I simply create new pools below the mainpool.

zfs create backup/tm-kurumi

Done! This took just a few seconds. Now I want that Time Machine does not fill up the complete space of the backup pool, so I set a quota. 500GB sounds reasonable, since I save most of my stuff directly to my server and my Mac Pro’s OS drive is a 240GB SSD.

zfs set quota=500G backup/tm-kurumi

Let’s see if it works:

root@karinka:/var/spool/cron/crontabs# zfs list
NAME                     USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
backup                  1.15T  2.85T   578G  /backup
backup/tm-kurumi         65K   500G   65K  /backup/tm-kurumi

Looks good! The next step is to assign the correct rights to this volume, so that the user can really use it when logging on to it via AFP and later using Time Machine.

chmod 770 -R /backup/tm-kurumi
chown -R dieta /backup/tm-kurumi

“dieta” is my username to access the AFP network.

Last step on the UNIX side is to make this volume “supported”. In the past a lot people were working with the following command on the CLIENT

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

but this is a bad idea – you need to redo this on every single client. There’s an easier option (especially from admins point of view) to make a volume supported from the server’s side.

touch /backup/tm-kurumi/.com.apple.timemachine.supported

That’s all you need to do (sure, per volume, but it saves you to touch others Macs from the terminal). Now this is a fully supported Time Machine volume Oh! It seems like this also works for Debian & other systems and not only Nexenta/OpenSolaris, so give it a try!

To share it, we need to add a single line (per Time Machine) to the /etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default:

/backup/tm-kurumi       "Time Machine Kurumi"   allow:dieta cnidscheme:dbd options:tm

Maybe you want to restart netatalk now using

/etc/init.d/netatalk restart

But I found out, that’s it’s not needed. AFP loads the netatalk config files when you log on to the server via Finder.

At last, connect to your server via AFP and log in to the new volume and them tell Time Machine to use this volume. Here’s a screenshot how it looks when the backup is done

Hope you enjoyed this post and have learned some stuff!

By the way: did it for all 4 Macs and this looks like this on Nexenta:

I’ve found this entry by crawling through sale e pepe which is another fascinating blog about OpenSolaris as (file)server and Macs as clients.

Ciao
Dennis