Another PBS setup walk-through

[jjoelc]

I know there are a good number of walk-throughs for setting up PBS, but an alarming number of them don't cover user accounts, using access tokens, etc. I wrote this up for work and decided to pass it along here. Hopefully it is helpful to someone else.

I'm very glad to hear suggestions for improvement, or anything I just got wrong!
https://github.com/jjoelc/pvesetup/blob/main/PBS Initial Setup.md

(edit - updated link)

 

[tcabernoch]

You did better than the vendor. Much.

I question encouraging people to install PBS alongside PVE. Maybe you build like that. I do not. There are reasons, but it comes down to a judgement call. If you encourage people that don't have sufficient perspective to make that judgement call, well then ... they wind up with a mess on their hands.

"Networking in PBS is configured nearly identically to how Proxmox Virtual Environment handles it"
I don't know if most folks are aware of this. There's one significant difference between PVE and PBS networking. PVE supports OpenVSwitch out of the box. Yes, you have to install OVS, but the OVS options are in the dropdown regardless of if its installed. PVE is meant to use OVS. ... PBS does NOT use OVS. If you treat it the same way and install OVS, in my experience, it breaks the GUI. Your PBS server is entirely busted. (If this ever changes, OVS options will become available in the PBS GUI. There are no such options, and OVS is NOT supported in PBS.)

I like the fact that you included accounts and permissions AFTER the creation of Namespaces. I've encountered issues that I ultimately determined to be bugs and had to nuke the whole stack and rebuild. Namespaces first. Then Accounts and Permissions.

The bit about setting up sync is gold. We don't talk about sync enough here. I like the fact that you discussed a test sync. When you combine Sync with Namespaces, particularly if you are NOT doing the whole stack, you can get some unexpected results and wind up duplicating the source Namespace structure nested into the target. Its not that hard to sort out, but one is likely to need some testing in order to do so.

All in all, this document looks a great deal like my own internal one. Without all the snarky comments.
It's a shame this post will just disappear in a week. Nice job.

 

[jjoelc]

Thank You!

I don't think I really "encouraged" the setup alongside PVE, but I definitely agree that it is not an ideal way to install it. I included it in my original write up because we have one specific client who will be set up like this... for.. reasons... I will consider trying to add more wording about it not being the recommended way!

I was not aware of that difference in networking. I've never really used OVS in PVE (one of our network guys is just dipping his toes into SDN in Proxmox, I'll let them find all of the "gotchas" there before I start messing with it outside of a lab!) Thanks for pointing that out!

I did try to make sure all of the basic pieces were there in one walkthrough. I know that by the time I was ready to start using namespaces, and users and tokens etc. my test system was in a pretty poor state! This is of course mostly what a test system is FOR, but was also exacerbated by getting my information piecemeal. A document on install, a different one to connect.. another bit here, and another over there... Where if I had just done things in a sensible order, I would have already had a solid foundation to be able to add or edit those pieces to fit needs. I'm glad to hear it made sense to someone other than me!

 

[tcabernoch]

Well, I linked to your article in one of the stickied threads.
People are going to read it.
You may want to update that bit about the co-install sooner than later.
Honestly, I'd cut that and break it out into another document entirely.
You are posting a how-to on a vendor site. Stay within the guardrails. Mostly.

 

[SteveITS]

Thanks!

A few comments:
There's an artifact "{.align-center width="400" query="?direct&400"}" in https://github.com/jjoelc/pvesetup/blob/main/PBS Initial Setup.md#connect-pbs-to-pve.

In the same section, "Go to Datastore -> Storage" should be "Datacenter"

There is "[IMPORTANT!]{.underline}" in https://github.com/jjoelc/pvesetup/blob/main/PBS Initial Setup.md#encrypted-backups.


I found the "remote token" on pbs1 (the original) needs "read permission on source datastore (either DatastoreBackup to only sync owned backups, or DatastoreReader to sync everything)." In my case DatastoreBackup synced the namespace names but it was all empty (no actual backups). [source]

 

[jjoelc]

Thanks!

A few comments:
There's an artifact "{.align-center width="400" query="?direct&400"}" in https://github.com/jjoelc/pvesetup/blob/main/PBS Initial Setup.md#connect-pbs-to-pve.

In the same section, "Go to Datastore -> Storage" should be "Datacenter"

There is "[IMPORTANT!]{.underline}" in https://github.com/jjoelc/pvesetup/blob/main/PBS Initial Setup.md#encrypted-backups.


I found the "remote token" on pbs1 (the original) needs "read permission on source datastore (either DatastoreBackup to only sync owned backups, or DatastoreReader to sync everything)." In my case DatastoreBackup synced the namespace names but it was all empty (no actual backups). [source]

Thanks! Corrections have been made!