you mean DNS RR?: maybe, but it is *non-deterministic* (ie, it is likely that I end up having two clients on the same interface one day, and the other I have them on the other interface, and someday one on each interface, and so on...)

I could also hack a different hostname --> IP mapping on each client, modifying its local hosts file, for unix systems, or.... lmhosts? (I don't remember), for windows.... but it keeps getting more complicated... imagine ~200 servers to backup, ~40 storage servers, it gets hard to keep track of it.

I could also forget about all of that, and just go ahead and use interface bonding for adding up the interfaces at L2, but once again: it is more complicated, and I require a switch that support it (I actually have it, but I know that not everybody have one)

The ideal would be that bacula actually could run a "round-robin" around several IP/Hostnames for the storage, so when it goes to tell the client "connect to this sd", it just picks an address from the pool, and gives it.... but for this we first need that bacula actually use several tapes at the same time, instead of interleaving the backup jobs on the same tape... off course, this complicates things. 

But I think there should be a better solution for using multi-drive autochanger.  I was thinking that it should run one job per drive, doesn't matter if all the jobs use the same pool, then you would end with one job on each tape, but you will have several "half-full" tapes.  It is not a simple matter, bacula is a complex software, and as the time pass-by, it keeps getting more complex.  When I wrote this "feature request", I didn't thought about all the details.

I was thinking about the *other* idea:

+ Configure one or  more drives on *different* servers, and have bacula contact the *autochanger server* (which, off course, will have some tapes connected to it) in order to ask for a the tape load for *other* server.

Maybe using a complex mtx script, that uses ssh + cert to connect to the *autochanger server*, and remotely run the mtx command.... this could actually work, except that bacula can get confussed with the different "barcodes" showing up on several servers at the same time, and don't think about the update slots scan command... maybe a "range filter" could help here, "cut" the autochanger into several pieces, and have each sd "own" its piece..... but then this reduce the usefullness of the whole idea.

I also think that bacula should have no problem where I put a tape, as long as the device has the same Media Type, I even remember to have seen some "suggestive" fields in the DB, that made this sort of thing possible, only that for some reason it just don't work.

 

Nice, I didn't know you could do that.  I always thought that each SD had one and only one bacula-dir.conf entry, because the manual states:

Name = <name>

The name of the storage resource. This name appears on the Storage directive specified in the Job resource and is required.

So... the Name should be the same as in the bacula-sd.conf on the SD server... How can you create several SD entries for the same SD server?, does bacula just ignore the Name and goes ahead and connect?