OS X Lion time machine => (afpd|iSCSI) => ZFS question

[Paul Mather]

On Jul 25, 2011, at 2:51 PM, Bakul Shah wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:15:06 EDT Gary Palmer <gpalmer at freebsd.org>  wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 02:56:17PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
>>> I am in no hurry to upgrade my MBP to OS X Lion but given Lion
>>> time machine and netatalk issues, I got wondering if iSCSI on
>>> FreeBSD is stable enough for time machine use. How much duct
>>> tape and baling wire are needed to make it work?!
>> 
>> Just a word of caution - I read somewhere that using iSCSI for Time
>> Machine means that you cannot use TM during an OS reinstall to
>> restore your files from the Time Machine archive as iSCSI isn't
>> available at that point.  It seems you have to use a locally 
>> attached disk or AFP for the support to be there during 
>> reinstall.  Not sure if thats still the case in Lion or not, I
>> would tend to suspect they still don't consider iSCSI a top tier
>> transport.
> 
> I read you can create a boot dvd from one of the files in the
> upgrade.


The problem is that the Boot DVD or Recovery Partition does not have an iSCSI initiator.  In fact, the Mac does not ship with an iSCSI initiator, and the common solution to obtaining one is to install the free globalSAN iSCSI Initiator for OS X.

Without an installed iSCSI initiator, you won't be able to mount the LUNs upon which is located the Time Machine volume from which you are trying to restore files.

Cheers,

Paul.