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Automount of AFP share as backup destination


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My searches didn't find anything about this, so here goes.

 

I've been using Retrospect for ages, and for the last few months have been backing up all my Macs using a backup server script that backs to up a file backup set (two of them, actually) on an Infrant ReadyNAS+ RAID server via AFP. I was using MountWatcher to ensure that the backup share was always mounted.

 

In the release notes for 6.1.138, I noted that I can "configure" the backup volume with my password and Retrospect will mount it as needed. Very nice! So I thought I'd set up Retrospect to do that, and skip starting MountWatcher (which I had added to the Retrospect Event Handler script). Reading the instructions (dupicated in this Knowledgebase article), it didn't make any sense to me why would you need to mount the share as root and save the password in the keychain, when you're providing Retrospect with the username and password for the mount anyway, so I skipped that step, and maybe that's the root of my problem. I'll try that soon.

 

Backups seem to work fine, but I was just looking in the console log on my backup server, and found the following entries, repeated ad infinitum:

Nov 7 06:22:16 WalkerTiBook kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_mount: /Volumes/backup, pid 1408

Nov 7 06:22:17 WalkerTiBook kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount: /Volumes/backup, flags 0, pid 1409

Nov 7 06:22:18 WalkerTiBook kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_mount: /Volumes/backup, pid 1410

Nov 7 06:22:18 WalkerTiBook kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount: /Volumes/backup, flags 0, pid 1411

Nov 7 06:23:32 WalkerTiBook kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_mount: /Volumes/backup, pid 1419

Nov 7 06:23:32 WalkerTiBook kernel[0]: AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount: /Volumes/backup, flags 0, pid 1420

 

At this time, the Retrospect Backup Server was running but no scripts were active. So, does all this mounting and unmounting have to do with me skipping the root account step, or is this considered "normal" behavior? If it's the latter, I'm going back to MountWatcher. If it's the former, do I need to leave the root user enabled after setting this up?

 

Oh, the backup server machine is a Titanium Powerbook G4 (with a dead display) running 10.4.9.

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One more thought, looking at the logs. It looks like the pid, which I presume is the process ID, changes with every request, i.e., one process mounts the volume and another process unmounts it. Could we have two processes that are in disagreement over whether the volume should currently be mounted?

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