GLOBALSAN ISCSI FREE INSTALL
GLOBALSAN ISCSI FREE FULL

I suppose it may well be a time/resources issue, but most of the puzzle is already in place - no modification needs to be done to Time Machine's backup software, they have much of the work done on an initiator, they just need to write some target software, and it's a pretty well established protocol (and who knows, they may already have one in the works). We've seen all sorts of problems with the way networked backups to Time Capsules go, and AFAIK, the promised capability to back up to other (non-server) Macs is MIA. It's an established protocol, and Apple has at least a beta-quality iSCSI initiator (it was at one point included in Leopard developer builds AFAIK). In theory it should appear completely the same since iSCSI is a block-level protocol, but I don't have an available enclosure to test it with yet.ДЄll in all, very cool, and brings me to my followup point: Apple really should use iSCSI to implement networked Time Machine backups. The other element I'm hoping to test is pulling the drive from my server and directly connecting it to my Mac.

GLOBALSAN ISCSI FREE INSTALL

So far I haven't tested restore capability, not wanting to spend time wiping and re-installing, but from my reading, it sounds like you can restore over iSCSI if you do a default re-install of OS X with a user account not present on the backup, then install the iSCSI setup and then opt for a Time Machine restore. I also was able to flawlessly resize and create new partitions without any trouble.

GLOBALSAN ISCSI FREE FULL

Afterwards I did a little testing on a separate partition and I was able to write at about as close to theoretical 100Mb speed as possible (sustained about 11.something MB/s), which bodes well for full gigabit transfers provided the disks can keep up. I went away for a while, but the speed must have picked up afterwards, since the backup was done in what seemed to be pretty reasonable time (this was done using directly connected Gigabit, since my home switch is mere 100Mb). Speed was a little iffy at first, but I think that was just Time Machine indexing etc. I connected to my iSCSI target on the server, and Disk Utility immediately offered to format the drive, and then Time Machine popped up asking to back up to it.

Using the free globalSAN Initiator on the OS X side of things was pretty painless too, although it required a reboot. Hadn't touched it before, but with a little Googling, it was very simple to set up on my Ubuntu server (one apt-get and editing about 3 lines of a config file, then restart the iscsi service).

My project this Sunday was playing around with iSCSI.

Globalsan iscsi free