Help me make backups go!

[annathepiper]

In this corner: three Debian servers.

In that corner: a shiny new one-terabyte drive, Apple-formatted, accessible at least to the Macs and Windows boxen in the house. On my laptop, I get to it by running Bonjour for Windows.

What I want to do: on the Debian servers, I want to connect to use smbclient (or, alternately, mount -t smbfs) to connect to this drive.

What happens when I try: I get timeout messages and "Operation already in progress".

On previous attempts, weirdly enough, I actually connected to the drive once. Then when I tried to copy a (large!) file over to it off of newmoon, it timed out on me. Subsequent attempts got me "protocol negotiation failed" until I then started seeing "operation already in progress".

Color me confused. Anybody able to enlighten me as to what's happening here, and what I can do to fix it to make it go? Thanks in advance for any help!

ETA 8:18pm: Turns out all we had to do was kick the Airport hub in the head. When it came back up, suddenly OH LOOK now it works. Yay!

Comments

[seattlesparks.livejournal.com]

What is the drive attached to? A router, a server, a little dedicated file-sharing tool, what?

[annathepiper]

It's hooked up to an Apple Airport Extreme drive, via USB. We have some suspicion that we may have confused it and just need to kick it in the head, but I don't know this for sure!

[rmd.livejournal.com]

ooh. what did you use for the terabyte drive?

[annathepiper]

It's a Lacie drive, hooked up via USB to an Apple Airport. :)

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

dear lord, why do you want to use smb to talk to it? does it run ssh? can you use rsync?

it really sucks to use smb-like stuff to back up linux; it doesn't understand groups and symlinks and all like that.

[annathepiper]

I'm not using it for the backup itself--the backup process itself is tar fed through bzip. I just want to use smb to dump the resulting archive files over onto the drive, since that minimizes the number of involved computers.

I'm pretty sure that it doesn't do anything clever like running ssh, but I don't know! I've never used rsync either so I don't know if that would work.

[blargh.livejournal.com]

Try mount -t cifs instead of smbfs.

[gerimaple.livejournal.com]

Rebooting is often your friend. I had to reboot my scanner today before it would talk to windows. VERY glad to hear it's working properly now

[annathepiper]

Thanks! This will make things rather easier to get backups automated, so yay!

[blargh.livejournal.com]

Reflect.
Repent.
Reboot.

[annathepiper]

Quite. ;)