I found out that the answer is, "Not yet." Mac OS X doesn't seem to play nicely with newer versions of Samba, I'm hoping that this will change in the coming weeks as Snow Leopard is released.

Initially, I set up the drives to use NTFS so that I could quickly unplug the disks and make use of them on a Windows machine. In the past year or so that the server has been running, though, I've done this a grand total of 0 times. I did, however, have to unplug the drive to restore my Mac when the hard drive decided to fail. As a result, I've reformatted the backup drive to HFS+.

Linux can read/write to essentially everything. And since I only access that drive through the server, I'm not concerned about directly plugging it in to a Windows machine any longer. Thus, at any point in the future should I need to directly restore via time machine, I can simply plug it into the Mac and continue about my business.

The second hard drive I have plugged in (which is used as a public file store) is formatted in NTFS.

A couple of questions:

What OS does your server run?

What disk format do you use for the server-attached external hard drives?

I haven't tried restoring directly over the network from the smb store (smbfs, the module used to mount the remote system is a little finicky). I had a copule of ideas though. Can you try and mount the system over ssh? I haven't used it on Mac, but sshfs on Linux is much more stable than smbfs.

A secondary thought, I use two external USB drives for the data stores on my server. In the case of failure on my Mac (happened after a Boot Camp misadventure), I can unplug the USB drive from the server and plug it in directly to the Mac. This is a bit of a cheat (because you aren't restoring directly over samba), it did work spectacularly. The boot CD found the time machine archive immediately and I was able to get back to work. This has the added benefit of being much, much faster than an over the network restore. (You might also just copy your time machine backup to external drive, it will accomplish the same thing and will be faster than a network restore.)

After I was up and running, I plugged the USB drive back into the server and was able to pick right up where I'd left off.

Last thought, if your server runs Linux, you could try and get lib-avahi up and running. This will enable afp for the server and might use that to restore. I wish you the best of luck. Personally, I think your best option is to copy the image to external USB and use that. It's worked for me twice and the whole process takes only a few hours.

Cheers,

Rob

If I start from the installation DVD and go to the terminal to mount my smb share containing the backup (mount -t smbfs //user@server/sharepoint /Volumes/sharemount) I get an error: "Failed to load smb library: Unknown Error 1102." This error does not occur when started from a full 10.5 installation. I can find no information regarding a workaround at this time.

While it is possible to restore files from the backup to a live 10.5 system, it is not (apparently) possible to fully restore the system using the Restore System from Backup on the install DVD.

If any one has tried and succeeded in a full restore from a remote smb volume, I would like to know how you managed it.

Also, thanks for the feedback. The addition of .sparsebundle to the image name is extremely important (and represents a typo on my part). I've updated the post above with your recommendations.

1. The filesystem type needs to be "HFS+J", not "Case Sensitive Journaled HFS+".
2. I specified an extension of ".sparsebundle" to the hdiutil command line.
3. I used "cp -rp Computername_MACaddress.sparsebundle /Volumes/backup/. to copy the bundle. I wasn't sure if preserving attributes is important. (my backup share is simply called "backup")

With changes 1 and 2, your hdiutil cmdline became:

sudo hdiutil create –size 250g –type SPARSEBUNDLE –nospotlight –volname “Backup of My Mac” –fs “HFS+J” –verbose ./Computername_MACaddress.sparsebundle

Thanks Rob! This was a giant help!