syncOsync on x86?

Hardware
1

There’s some intel/amd-hardware out there that is quite resource efficient (thin clients, nuc-type mini pc boxes). I would like to use syncOsync on such hardware: Is that possible? And how can I do it?

2

I would like to use syncOsync on such hardware: Is that possible? And how can I do it?

This should basically be no issue at all, as the automated tests are also running in qemu-system-x86_64. The base image is generated using a preseed.cfg (located in amd_installer_emulation/bullseye/preseed.cfg)

So you have two options two set up the system:

a) use this preeseed.cfg - see DebianInstaller/Preseed - Debian Wiki

b) do it manually:

  1. install bullseye netinst
  2. add user sosadmin
  3. add deb http://deb.syncosync.org bullseye main to the sources list
  4. get the repo key from http://deb.syncosync.org/syncosync.key and add it.
    apt-key adv --fetch-keys http://deb.syncosync.org/syncosync.key should do the job
  5. install syncosync package

Now, what is important to understand is, how syncosync find “it’s drives”, as the concept is, sos is using this drives exclusively!!! So you need an OS disk (or small ssd) and the main disk(s) for the backup data.

First: stop syncosync with “service syncosync stop”

Now, check what systype is set with sosconfig -g, the systype should be 1, which is generic. If not, change this to generic with: sosconfig.py -s '{"systype": 1}'

Next is to decide which disks you like to use:

Issue lsscsi to find out, which disks are there.

root@syncosync:/usr/share/syncosync/system-descriptions# lsscsi
[0:0:0:0]    disk    ATA      QEMU HARDDISK    2.5+  /dev/sda 
[0:0:1:0]    disk    ATA      QEMU HARDDISK    2.5+  /dev/sdb

In this example, two disks are shown, but disk [0:0:0:0] contains the OS, so this should not be used.

To achieve this edit /usr/share/syncosync/system-descriptions/generic/type_config.json to
contain only the drives which should be used for syncosync backups. And while you are there, check if the network interface looks the same.

After starting the syncosync service again, only the configured disks should be shown to be used.

If you think this whole system would be easy to reproduce we could even set up dedicated install images for it… we should try to find out how to detect the system and we are done.
(this is done in src/soscore/soshelpers_hardware.py · master · syncosync / syncosync · GitLab)