OSX Time Machine Backups to Solaris ZFS Volume

Teo de Hesselle

Jul 7, 2013 • 1 min read

Tested on Solaris 11.1, Netatalk 3.0.4, and OSX 10.8.4

Goal: Back up the household laptops over the network to a solaris fileserver

This seems to work better with AFP rather than SMB, so I installed netatalk 3.0.4 from source.

Note: This was cobbled together from information contained in a few other blogs -- I don't pretend to be a netatalk expert.

Install Pre-requisite Solaris packages:

pkg install developer/gcc-3 system/library/math/header-math \ 
    developer/gnu developer/gnu-binutils  \
    developer/gnome/gettext libgcrypt openssl
`</pre> 

### Download, build and install netatalk:
 <pre>`wget .../netatalk-3.0.4.tar.gz

tar xzf netatalk-3.0.4.tar.gz
cd netatalk-3.0.4
./configure  --without-ddp --with-init-style=solaris --prefix=/usr/local/netatalk-3.0.4
make
sudo -s     # it didn't like running make install under sudo.
install         
`</pre> 

### Setup PAM for netatalk

I'm not 100% sure why this would be required, I assume it's something to do with netatalk's PAM implementation.
 <pre>`cp /etc/pam.d/other /etc/pam.d/netatalk
`</pre> 

### Make a ZFS dataset to store our data

… since time machine is designed to eventually consume all space available, a quota is a good idea.
 <pre>`zfs create -o mountpoint=/timemachine tank/timemachine
zfs create -o quota=1tb tank/timemachine/tdehesse
chown tdehesse /timemachine/tdehesse
`</pre> 

### Setup Netatalk
 <pre>`cat &gt; /usr/local/netatalk-3.0.4/etc/afp.conf &lt;&lt;EOF
;
; Netatalk 3.x configuration file
;

[Global]
; Global server settings
mimic model = MacPro

[timemachine_tdehesse]
path=/timemachine/tdehesse
time machine = yes
EOF
`</pre> 

### enable autodiscovery related services
 <pre>`root@velocity:bin# svcadm enable svc:/network/dns/multicast:default
root@velocity:bin# svcadm enable svc:/system/avahi-bridge-dsd:default
`</pre> 

### Start netatalk

Netatalk was kind enough to include SMF functionality for us :)
 <pre>`svcadm enable netatalk
svcs netatalk
STATE          STIME    FMRI
online         11:11:10 svc:/network/netatalk:default

Setup OSX

This is really simple -- Since netatalk is advertising the volume as being time-machine compatible, the volume should "just work" and appear in the time machine preferences as a regular volume without any client-side hacks, which should help if we ever need to do a bare-metal recovery.