To my understanding, we are advised not to use "localhost" because those address fields may be used to communicate "this is the director / SD address" to an external client. This is my guess. Someone else would need to confirm, or you can check the (very verbose) documentation.
FYI, the best way to search the documentation is to download the pdf and search it. HTML manual search across multiple pages isn't possible for some bizarre reason. All of this is in my experience, anyhow. In an environment where local hostname resolution isn't handled by the router or some other central authority, I have used avahi on my bacula server. Avahi is a peer to peer name resolution system. I believe avahi is what windows machines are using to resolve LAN hostnames in environments where the router or DNS server isn't handling that for them. In any case, it got me out of a similar jam once. I believe that it would be suitable to use either a hostname or LAN IP address, as long as the relevant clients can resolve / reach either of those. You will need suitable firewall rules on the server and possibly the client, of course. If you previously tried the server's LAN IP address, and that didn't work (and you also restarted the bacula dir/sd after making the configuration changes), I'd try temporarily disabling the firewall on the server / client to see I'd that resolves the issue. Please remember to restart the bacula-dir and bacula-sd after changing their configuration files. Here is some information on firewalls and bacula. Please note that the author of this documentation mentions server config files 'server-dir.conf' and 'server-sd.conf'. These are simply what he has chosen to name his config files, and he has referenced them from within the bacula-dir.conf / bacula-sd.conf files. For your purposes, just pretend he wrote 'bacula-dir.conf' and 'bacula-sd.conf'. https://www.bacula.org/15.0.x-manuals/en/problems/Dealing_with_Firewalls.html And of course, here is the bacula manual, in PDF form: https://www.bacula.org/15.0.x-manuals/en/main/main.pdf And the documentation in general: https://www.bacula.org/documentation/documentation/ I am *NOT* saying 'RTFM'. It is a *very* large manual (700+ pages currently). I want you to have the same resources I used to reach a greater understanding of bacula. Asking this mailing list was one of the resources I used. Feel free to continue asking questions here. :) I will send some of my avahi configuration notes in a follow-on email. Robert Gerber 402-237-8692 [email protected] On Mon, Sep 1, 2025, 3:08 PM Gary Dale <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm running Debian 13 (Trixie) on an AMD64 system. > > I've been struggling to get bconsole to connect to the storage-director. > After initially trying to set up a reverse lookup for the server name, I > took the easy way out and replaced the name with the IP address in the > autochanger section of bacular-dir.conf. That didn't help. > > The reason I was doing all this is immediately above the Address - line > in that section, it specifically says "Do not use "localhost" here". > Furthermore, the line itself says "N.B. Use a fully qualified name here". > > However, it appears that localhost, or more specifically 127.0,0.1, is > the only address that works. > > From what I've been reading, if you do follow the "N.B.", you need to > ensure that there is a working reverse DNS lookup for it in order to > work. However that need should be removed by using an IP address > instead. But if you are running the bacula director on the same device > as the storage director, it appears that you must use the Localhost IP > (127.0.0.1). > > Can someone please revise the comments to be more reflective of a > typical situation? > > > > _______________________________________________ > Bacula-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users >
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