What are the best practices for mounting snapshots in linux?

What are the best practices for mounting snapshots in linux?

These are snapshots of an iscsi volume that was initiated in LVM 2 in Red Hat 5 (or CentOS, if you like) as an ext3 volume. We have a customer that wants to be able to easily mount a snapshot to get at old files. A backup system would probably be used to mount a snapshot, so this helps get around issues involving having the "same" volume mounted twice on a system (which, incidentally, causes Windows XP Pro to hard crash if you use the MS iscsi initiator).

You really want to be able to see a iscsi target, import it somehow into lvm's database then mount it read-only on your backupserver I gather?

Does your backup server have the same OS or does it support all the fancyness of LVM2 with ext3 filesystems? Our backup servers wouldn't - they are all Solaris.

Just share out the target and make sure you can see it with your disk formatting tools on the backup host and you can kind of follow this:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8874

Let me know if that was enough to get you started - I am thinking of quite a few pitfalls and I want to see if you encounter them using lvm :p

I found this in the manual... IT could help.. Check the mount command in the manual..

After snapshot for iSCSI target has been created and activated, you can access
it by following:
• Go to menu CONFIGURATION -> iSCSI target manager -> Targets ->
[target_name],
• Use function Target volume manger, click on button "add" on the right side of
snapshot you want to have access to. New LUN will be added to the target,
• Now you can connect with your iSCSI initiator and use your snapshot target,
• Example (Microsoft Windows environment). Please download Microsoft iSCSI
Initiator and follow instructions,
• Start the software and add targets,
• Menu Target Portals and enter IP Address of Open-E Data Storage System and
Socket (default 3260),
• In menu Available targets please “Log On” into already added target,
• Now your snapshot target will show up in your system and you can use it.