After I don’t know how many attempts at trying to use a mounted drive as the DATA volume for BackupPC I finally got this to work after chasing down far too many rabbit holes.
The first problem I hit was:
Error: lsetxattr /home/backuppc1/.local/share/containers/storage/volumes/data/_data: operation not supported
Initially I thought that Davide’s comment was the reason as I was trying to use NFS. But then I got the same with a CIFS mount. So to me it sounds like SELinux is now getting in the way, so I just disabled SELinux for testing. Strangely making it permissive still forced an error, not just a warning.
Digging around I found quite a few comments regarding NFS mounts and Podman that state that the later versions do support NFS on rootless containers (forgive me if I get some of the terminology wrong, I’m still need things ELIF). But could I get this to work: NO. But I did get some strange issues along the journey, like the mounted DATA path being accessible and writable, but parts of the application directory tree containing the execution binaries being empty.
After giving up on NFS, it was CIFS turn. With this I got closer to it working, but again just slightly out of reach. The closest I got came down to the ownership of the DATA location. Even with this:
runagent -m backuppc1 podman volume create --opt=device=/mnt/backupdata/ --opt=type=bind --opt=o=uid=1000,gid=1000 data
The directory still ended up being owned by root, which meant the application couldn’t write to it.
In the end, as desperation set in, I tried iSCSI, which turned out to be a relatively smooth process, with success.
So, for anyone else struggling with this in the future, there’s my solution for the search engine to find.
Cheers.