Re: FreeBSD+samba as a time machine server for OSX/Ventura?

From: Craig Leres <leres_at_freebsd.org>
Date: Sun, 05 Mar 2023 03:05:10 UTC
I finally got a chance to work on this today. The many followups are 
appreciated.

samba413 -> samba416 is definitely something I was missing. I think 
there was only 4.1.3 when I first switched to samba.

Not sure why netatalk3 stopped working for me. Nice to see Dan's proof 
that this is still a viable time machine solution. I think I'll stick 
with samba as it may one day allow me to backup my windows laptop.

I am using zfs on the FreeBSD side.

The fruit:zero_file_id situation is interesting but I'm on 13.1-RELEASE 
so I don't think it applies to me yet. But nice that I won't run into it 
once I do upgrade to 13.2.

I have not previously run any kind of mdns on the FreeBSD system; I 
tried my hand at a minimal avahi config that I think works. But I think 
this just makes it possible to browse for the remote server from the 
time machine settings page. I had previously just been using %K in 
finder to connect to server. (Maybe this will help me with windows down 
the road.)

I found a different recipe to get at the logs:

     log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine"' --info 
--last 6h | grep -F 'eMac' | grep -Fv 'etat' | awk -F']' '{print 
substr($0,1,19), $NF}'

Something that popped out right away is that the mac was trying to get 
into a uuid named directory in 
'file:///Volumes/.timemachine/XYZ._smb._tcp.local.' that did not exist. 
Then I found many "Backup of <HOST> <N>" directories in /Volumes. This 
all made me think that the mac was trying to continue using the 
pre-ventura backup so I nuked the files that were in that directory (and 
the failed files on the server) and rebooted the mac. After re-adding 
the remote volume, I have a time machine backup in progress for the 
first time since 2021.

Thanks to all; freebsd-hackers (as usual) for the win!

		Craig