Nethserver-urbackup need testers

don’t know, I saw something around 20h (paris time)

Maybe I hit this :slight_smile:

I installed the server now it it seems to work.
Do you know if there is a setting in Urbackup where I can configure the Server to store the backups on a network share?
I don’t find something like this and also Dr. Google is not helpful :frowning:

don’t know, maybe you can mount your network share in your fstab and use a local mount.

This is why I did a call to user’s experience, we should write a lot of things in the wiki

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Don’t know how to mount Network shares on Linux ^^

I like to store the data on a NAS and not on the VM where UrBackup is running. All the backups would be in the Veeam-Backup of the VM in that case… A little bit duplicated.

I created a discussion in the community of UrBackup:

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Hi @stephdl have tested jail as promissed.

This works very effective. I couldn’t reach the hole vm for 10 min. no http, no ssh. I was banned! :scream:

Great contrib for NS7. Thank you very much. :+1: :+1: :clap: :clap: (all in mega version :wink:)

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Hi,

a little bit of time is gone and I finally found the time to setup a Nethserver with UrBackup. I am using it to backup all clients once and after bigger changes.
What I archived so far is

  • Install it on Nethserver
  • Mount a CIFS/SMB Share that is password protected to store the Backups
  • Silent remote install of the UrBackup Client (Windows)
  • Backup every client

What I still want to do is:

  • Store a generalized Backup for deployment on new machines that is not related to any existing PC. But I don’t know if this is possible with UrBackup.

What I did was the following:

  1. To install it on Nethserver I followed the instructions by @stephdl in this thread and in several Wikis. So I think it is useful that I am writing this.
    I executed the following commands on the console to install UrBackup:

    yum install http://mirror.de-labrusse.fr/NethServer/7/x86_64/nethserver-stephdl-1.0.2-1.ns7.sdl.noarch.rpm
    yum install nethserver-urbackup --enablerepo=stephdl

This installs UrBackup which is accessable via https://myserver/urbackup/ (the final / is important regarding the Wiki)! It is also added to the applications tab of the Nethserver WebGUI.

  1. To mount a CIFS/SMB share that is password protected you have to install the cifs-utils package first

    yum install cifs-utils

After that you can mount the share with this two commands:

mkdir /mnt/backup
mount.cifs //mynas/BackupDisk /mnt/backup -o username=backup,domain=mynas,password=mypassword

This mounts the share “BackupDisk” on the system “mynas” to the directory /mnt/backup. The -o parameter provides username, domain and password. All three must be set. I left the domain-part and the command didn’t worked anymore.
If you leave it like this, your mount is gone after restart. You can do the following, if you are the only one that has access to the nethserver. The password is stored in cleartext:
Start the vi editor

 vi /etc/fstab

press i (insert mode). And set the cursor to a free line. Enter the following text. The seperator between the blocks are Tabs.

 //mynas/BackupDisk	/mnt/backup	cifs	username=backup,password=mypassword,domain=mynas,iocharset=utf8,sec=ntlm	0	0

Press Ctrl+c(cancel insert) and ZZ(Upper case, Save and exit).
Now your share should be connected even after a restart.

  1. Silent remote deployment. This was harder than expected because I had troubles using the psexec -c -f parameter. It copies the file you want to run to the target systems system32-folder before execution. The problem is, that if you run the UrBackup Client setup from that folder - even manually through the UI - the setup just shows an error. So I created a script that copies the setup “manually” to the Windows Temp folder. If you run it from there, it works.
    This is my final batch-script, that is located in a folder where the UrBackup Client 2.1.15.exe and the psexec.exe is located next to the script:

    set /p remotepc=PC to deploy [Hostname/IP address]:
    net use j: \%remotepc%\c$\Windows\Temp
    copy “UrBackup Client 2.1.15.exe” j:
    net use j: /delete
    start psexec.exe \%remotepc% -s “c:\Windows\Temp\UrBackup Client 2.1.15.exe” /S /D=
    PAUSE

  2. Finally I configured the UrBackup Server and after the remote deployment the machines came online in the UrBackup interface and I was able to start a full Image Backup

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Looks an interesting attempt, I can’t wait to see this module widely used by our community

@hunv, thank a lot. You should add this to the urbackup wiki page. If the wiki syntax is a problem, ping me I will do the layout

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done, @Hunv or any other please add you grain of salt urbackup [NethServer Wiki]

Looks good so far.
The first time I read the wiki I missed the part with adding your repository, but I think this was just my failure. Everything else is already in the wiki and the SMB thing is a more common thing that is not directly related to UrBackup I think.

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We just discovered UrBackup ourselves and plan to do some testing before implementing it on our customers. I’ve seen the great work from Stéphane, as expected (BTW congrats and cheers).

A quick question: was the “client” side ever implemented/tested?

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The client is provided by the project urbackup…you must install it if you want to use this backup system on your client.

If by using it you have cool feature/advice, please add it to the wiki page or ask a new feature request.

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Let’s see how the tests are going. I already integrated the binary client provided by them within NethServer, but this is the easy part (sorry for the Italian interface):

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I’m curious, how tests are going?

I’ve tried the server part and decided to put everything inside /var/lib/nethserver/urbackup directory.
I had to fire these commands:

 mkdir /var/lib/nethserver/urbackup
 chown urbackup:urbackup /var/lib/nethserver/urbackup

I’m curious too, have you done something in the last month @syntaxerrormmm ?

Data backup is working for about 1 month on my Win 7 client like a charm, I backup some testfolders, logfiles and my Nethserver history(screenshots and textfiles):

I don’t use image backup, I deactivated it and never tried, but if testing is necessary…

Also used it to backup a Debian notebook, just data, and it’s working too…sorry I set it up before I posted here, so I don’t have docs anymore…EDIT: found some docs I used for client install and put it in the wiki:
https://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=urbackup#admin_s_feedbacks
If it’s working for others too, I may put it in the wiki as regular article…

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We are testing it right now, doing file/image backup and restore. If tests are successful as they are until now, we plan to go in production with our first customer next week.

Our setup is a little different from what expected: we use a QNAP NAS as a backup server, since it can do storage and has a QPKG containing the UrBackup server (more here).

Configuration of the server has been done by hand, configuring groups of hosts as requested with image and file backup. For GNU/Linux no image backups unfortunately, since it is based on LVM-snapshot and we didn’t leave sufficient space on Volume Groups to allow for full snapshots. Also, for us NS is only a client.

Pros:

  • The solution is really complete, allowing backup and restore of any OS, including Windows (we just tried to restore a Windows 7 machine from complete+incremental image backups and it works really well; speed on network is not so good but YMMV, 20 GB compressed image + incremental images are restored to a 50 GB Windows 7 VM in about 1 hour);
  • Backup of file is really quick, also on Windows (100 GB of data in less than 1 hour);
  • Images can be grabbed (on Windows at least) while the system is up and running using VSS;
  • Restore ISO are provided. The server includes all the clients for any OSes;
  • Restore is available: on place (Restore button on the single entry), by downloading the single file or by downloading a zip file (the two latter options very convenient);
  • You can customize user access to allow restoration of files on some hosts but not on others. You may also completely disable what a user can do on a single machine, due to granular permissions management;
  • On our setup, the storage for the backups is also shared via SMB and NFS, so you may navigate each incremental backup copy as it was a complete one (due to hard links usage);
  • Open files on Windows can be backupped anyways (this solves the problem, for example, of Outlook’s open PST files which aren’t backuppable, otherwise);
  • The full history of backups is available, so you may choose which version of the file to restore.
  • Backup, Archiviation and Cleanup time windows are configurable; Backup windows can be set for image and file backup distinctly;
  • Also bandwidth and number of contemporary backup processes are configurable;
  • Hosts can be managed in groups with similar settings;
  • You can allow the single user (or better, client) to change the set of directories to be included/excluded from backup;
  • Once started a backup, if the machine is not available anymore, the backup stops; as soon as the machine becomes available again, the backup restarts where it ended.

Cons:

  • There are a lot of options, which you can configure by default, by groups of hosts or by single host: it is quite complex to manage it, but extremely flexible;
  • Archiving and Backup timeframe are a little tricky to set up, but again this is also a big plus and they are well documented;
  • Binary clients from official site (the one I installed in NS) is backup-only; you need to recompile a GUI version if you need to restore files on NS, which is not adviced on NS. The only foreseable way we have seen to restore files to NS when needed are browsing NFS/SMB shared storage or using an rsync/ssh client on the same machine where the storage resides (QNAP helps on this, making available both ssh shells and rsync client/server).

Our opinion on UrBackup is quite high, the product is really good and very flexible.

For a single standalone server, using UrBackup seems like killing an ant with a bazooka; a more balanced choice is using the default duplicity in that case. If you have more than a machine to manage, it will replace a full-fledged (and costly) enterprise backup solution hands down.

HTH.

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Great overview! :heart_eyes:

Still, it doesn’t say how well the nethserver-urbackup package works :sweat: I will at least document the steps needed to install and configure the backup client on NS, as soon as I can. I promise.

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