BackupPC on Ubuntu 12.04

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I recently upgraded my home server from Ubuntu 10.10 maverick to 12.04 precise. I ran “do-release-upgrade” three times, upgrading through natty and oneiric. The process was very smooth, but I found a few bugs with BackupPC. If you are using BackupPC 3.2.1 on precise, or plan to upgrade soon, I suggest you read the following.

1. $Conf{Ping6Path} is not set

This was a surprise to me, as I use IPv4 for running backups. Since natty, not setting $Conf{Ping6Path} causes BackupPC to report “no ping response” for most hosts. Strangely, this error is irregular. Pings to some hosts always succeed, while others only succeed sometimes. No hosts consistently failed.

The solution is easy. Set this in /etc/backuppc/config:

$Conf{Ping6Path} = '/bin/ping6';

2. Use of qw(…) as parentheses is deprecated

Since Perl 5.14 in Ubuntu 11.10 oneiric, BackupPC reports these errors at startup, in logs, and during command-line operations:

Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at /usr/share/backuppc/lib/BackupPC/Storage/Text.pm line 302.
Use of qw(...) as parentheses is deprecated at /usr/share/backuppc/lib/BackupPC/Lib.pm line 1425.

To resolve this, download this patch, and apply it. Here is a handy one-liner which will fail safely if anything goes wrong:

wget -q http://www.tolaris.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BackupPC-3.2.1-CVE-2011-170886.diff -O- | patch -p0 -N -r - -d /usr/share/backuppc/

3. BackupPC displays bogus “Last email sent” messages

BackupPC will send error message emails to the administrator or user of a host (backup target) if it cannot reach the host for a set period of time. The user interface always displays this last message, even if it doesn’t exist:

Last email sent to user@example.com was at 2012-05-01 01:23, subject “”.

Last year I wrote a patch to resolve this. If no email has ever been sent (last email subject is undefined), it simply doesn’t output the “Last email sent” line. My patch has never made it upstream, so I patch it manually after upgrades.

To resolve this, download this patch, and apply it.

wget -q http://www.tolaris.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BackupPC-3.2.1-no_blank_email.diff -O- | patch -p0 -N -r - -d /usr/share/backuppc/

Apply both patches with:

wget -q http://www.tolaris.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BackupPC-3.2.1-CVE-2011-170886.diff http://www.tolaris.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BackupPC-3.2.1-no_blank_email.diff -O- | patch -p0 -N -r - -d /usr/share/backuppc/

Comments

25 responses to “BackupPC on Ubuntu 12.04”

2012-06-07

Jason Greene

Hi. Thanks for the info. I tried your patch to resolve the Use of qw(…) as parentheses is deprecated, but i get the following error:

Hunk #1 succeeded at 300 (offset 1 line).
patch: **** Can’t rename file lib/BackupPC/Storage/Text.pm to lib/BackupPC/Storage/Text.pm.orig : Permission denied

I used sudo so I’m not sure what went wrong?

Any help is appreciated.

Reply
1. 2012-06-07
  
  Jason Greene
  
  Solved:
  logged in as root using sudo -i and ran it again. worked!
  
  Reply
  1. 2012-06-07
    
    Tyler Wagner
    
    sudo is tricky with pipes (|) and redirects (> and <). You must use sudo after each pipe (actually before each command that needs root permissions), and you cannot use redirects at all (they will run as your user). The wget commands don't need sudo. The patch commands do.
    
    Reply
2012-06-11

Mike Lerley

I’ve just discovered that I have this problem: http://www.mail-archive.com/backuppc-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg23798.html

Any suggestions? I don’t see an easy way to downgrade Samba to a useful version in Precise. Maybe there’s a simple patch for backuppc that could fix the returned error issue?

Reply
1. 2012-06-12
  
  Tyler Wagner
  
  I’m not using Samba for backup on my 12.04 server at present, but I’ll need this too.
  
  In the mean time, the easy solution is to (untested, please let me know):
  
  1. Add the oneiric repos to your precise server
  2. apt-get install smbclient=2:3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3
  3. echo “smbclient hold” | dpkg –set-selections
  
  If you confirm that this works, and give me the apt-get output (so I can get the downloaded package list), I’ll import these packages to my repository for precise for everyone else.
  
  Reply
  1. 2012-06-13
    
    Mike Lerley
    
    OK. I had to remove winbind (not using it anyway) and I ended up with the following downgrades:
    
    Setting up libwbclient0 (2:3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3) …
    Setting up samba-common (2:3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3) …
    Setting up winbind (2:3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3) …
    Setting up samba-common-bin (2:3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3) …
    Setting up libpam-smbpass (2:3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3) …
    Setting up smbclient (2:3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3) …
    
    HOWEVER, not much works — running smbclient gives me
    
    smbclient: relocation error: smbclient: symbol krb5_locate_kdc, version krb5_3_MIT not defined in file libkrb5.so.3 with link time reference
    
    Downgrading libkrb widens and deepens the rabbit hole to a place where it seems to be a very, very bad idea. I’m going to try building the previous version from source and see what happens. Ugh.
    
    I wonder if samba 4 has the same issue? Or other, worse ones?
    
    Reply
    1. 2012-06-13
      
      Tyler Wagner
      
      That is a link issue against the older libraries.
      
      I’ve build Samba from oneiric against libraries in precise using pbuilder (see elsewhere in my blog), and uploaded the packages to my precise repository. Try:
      
      1. Add my precise repo to your precise server
      2. apt-get install smbclient=2:3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3
      3. echo “smbclient hold” | dpkg –set-selections
      
      I am uploading amd64 now. i386 packages will be ready and uploaded in about an hour.
      
      Reply
      1. 2012-06-13
        
        Mike Lerley
        
        I managed to compile 3.5.11 and get it running alongside the broken packages. It would make a package purist cry but coming from a long history of Slackware I’ll put up with it until it gets fixed. Running a backup atm; I’ll try again with your packages in a while. Thanks!
        
        Reply
        
        2012-06-13
        
        Tyler Wagner
        
        OK, thanks. Total package list imported into repo:
        
        libpam-smbpass_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        libpam-smbpass_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        libsmbclient_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        libsmbclient_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        libsmbclient-dev_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        libsmbclient-dev_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        libwbclient0_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        libwbclient0_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        libwbclient-dev_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        libwbclient-dev_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        samba_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.changes
        samba_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        samba_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3.debian.tar.gz
        samba_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3.dsc
        samba_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.changes
        samba_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        samba_3.5.11~dfsg.orig.tar.bz2
        samba-common_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_all.deb
        samba-common-bin_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        samba-common-bin_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        samba-dbg_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        samba-dbg_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        samba-doc_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_all.deb
        samba-doc-pdf_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_all.deb
        samba-tools_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        samba-tools_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        smbclient_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        smbclient_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        swat_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        swat_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        winbind_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_amd64.deb
        winbind_3.5.11~dfsg-1ubuntu2.3_i386.deb
        
        If your test results positive, I’ll make a new blog post about this for others to find.
        
        Reply
        
        2012-06-13
        
        Mike Lerley
        
        Had to uninstall a couple of interim things but reinstalling with all your packages seems to be working great! Thanks a lot.
        
        Reply
        
        2012-06-13
        
        Tyler Wagner
        
        Awesome, Mike. I’ll post about this shortly, and inform the list.
        
        Reply
        
        2013-01-21
        
        Sam Powis
        
        A bit late to the party, I know – but I just updated my fileserver to 12.04 and had the same library issues. Your package worked a treat, once I realised I had to apt-get update before it’d ‘see’ the packages in your repository :). Samba is now running again and I can access my shares. Thank you!
        
        Reply
2012-06-11

Jason Greene

I never got it to work right. I gave up and went back to 10.04 LTS until I see a fix in the wild.

Reply
2012-10-18

Claudio

Thanks for sharing your patch, worked flawlessly (as root).

Reply
2012-11-12

Jerry

Worked great on a recently updated BackupPC on Ubuntu 10.04 -> 12.04.
Thanks for sharing Tyler!

Reply
2013-01-11

TONY

Thanks for sharing man solved my issues in seconds.

Reply
2013-07-24

Alex

Both patches worked well.

Reply
2013-08-18

tellme

Ubuntu 12.04
Backuppc 3.3.0

message:

root@backuppc:~# wget -q http://www.tolaris.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BackupPC-3.2.1-CVE-2011-170886.diff -O- | patch -p0 -N -r – -d /usr/share/backuppc/
-bash: patch: command not found

any options ?

Reply
1. 2013-08-19
  
  Tyler Wagner
  
  apt-get install patch
  
  Reply
  1. 2013-08-21
    
    tellme
    
    Hi Tyler, thanks for your input, i now have use this command, however i still get an error:
    
    root@backuppc:~# sudo wget -q http://www.tolaris.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BackupPC-3.2.1-no_blank_email.diff -O- | apt-get install patch -p0 -N -r – -d /usr/share/backuppc/
    E: Command line option ‘p’ [from -p0] is not known.
    root@backuppc:~#
    
    I use root login.
    Any ideas what i do wrong ?
    
    Thank u !
    
    Reply
    1. 2013-08-22
      
      Tyler Wagner
      
      No, you need to install patch first:
      
      apt-get install patch wget -q http://www.tolaris.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/BackupPC-3.2.1-CVE-2011-170886.diff -O- | patch -p0 -N -r – -d /usr/share/backuppc/
      
      If this is your first time using Ubuntu, you’ll need to spend some time reading the basics of installing software. If this is your first time with BackupPC, you need to know how permissions work in Linux, and what filesystem hardlinks are.
      
      Reply
2013-08-22

tellme

ooooooo , ok, thanks for explaining, i have never heard or used an installable package named ‘patch’ in ubuntu.
Clear now, go and give it a try again….thank you !!

Reply
1. 2013-08-22
  
  tellme
  
  Thanks Tyler, all went without a scratch :-) Both patches. Hope the error and email message are not an issue anymore.
  thank you.
  
  Regards Tellme.
  
  Reply
  1. 2013-08-23
    
    Tyler Wagner
    
    Glad I could help. “patch” is a standard tool for applying changes to source code. Consider installing the standard tools for future use:
    
    apt-get install build-essential
    
    Reply
    1. 2013-08-23
      
      tellme
      
      Many Thanks Tyler for reply patience and knowledge, I will install these tools now as a standard when installing a new linux server !!! Tnaks for the patches, they works !
      
      Best regards
      Tellme
      
      Reply