Install Duplicati on TrueNAS (FreeBSD-based)?

[Kahomono]

Has anyone installed Duplicati on a FreeBSD based system? Does mono even exist for that?

[drwtsn32]

A quick Google search seems to indicate TrueNAS is the successor to FreeNAS? I remember several threads here where people discussed getting Duplicati to work on FreeNAS, so I would think it should also work on TrueNAS.

[Kahomono]

OK: I have installed mono (5.10! Pleasant surprise!) on a jail. Planning to add duplicati then back up mount points.

After install I got this message:

Libinotify functionality on FreeBSD is missing support for

• detecting a file being moved into or out of a directory within the
  same filesystem
• certain modifications to a symbolic link (rather than the
  file it points to.)

in addition to the known limitations on all platforms using kqueue(2)
where various open and close notifications are unimplemented.

This means the following regression tests will fail:

Directory notifications:
IN_MOVED_FROM
IN_MOVED_TO

Open/close notifications:
IN_OPEN
IN_CLOSE_NOWRITE
IN_CLOSE_WRITE

Symbolic Link notifications:
IN_DONT_FOLLOW
IN_ATTRIB
IN_MOVE_SELF
IN_DELETE_SELF

Kernel patches to address the missing directory and symbolic link
notifications are available from:

https://github.com/libinotify-kqueue/libinotify-kqueue/tree/master/patches

You might want to consider increasing the kern.maxfiles tunable if you plan
to use this library for applications that need to monitor activity of a lot
of files.

Is this a concern for duplicati?

[drwtsn32]

@Kahomono

Is this a concern for duplicati?

I’m not sure. I don’t know if Duplicati makes use of these notification events even on systems that support their usage (I kind of doubt it). Standard behavior for Duplicati is to enumerate the filesystem at the start of a backup, checking for new/deleted files or changed files (by comparing metadata to previous backup).

[Kahomono]

So now - what’s my best next-step? Build from source and hope for the best? I don’t think I am up to porting it and I see no *BSD version.

[drwtsn32]

Someone published a Duplicati plugin for FreeNAS. Is that not available for the TrueNAS successor?

[Kahomono]

It installs but does not seem to run reliably. It has crashed my test VM at least twice. I need to seriously reconsider how to backup my new server.

Running Duplicati on the same box to backup what’s on that box seems best. But… is it essential?

[drwtsn32]

I would try to run it on the same box if at all possible, but it’s not absolutely required.

Does TrueNAS have the ability to run docker images? That may be another approach.

[Kahomono]

I can try that but that seems like bringing YET ANOTHER variable into the mix. Which is uncool

TrueNAS can also run arbitrary VMs so I can always build a small Debian VM with Duplicati on it.

[drwtsn32]

Hmmm… a full VM would be more resource intensive than a docker container.

I may try to download TrueNAS and mess around with it to see if I can get Duplicati running. Exactly which TrueNAS did you download? Is it TrueNAS Core or…?

[ts678]

@Kahomono

I don’t think I am up to porting it and I see no *BSD version.

Versions are OS-friendly packages. The files run are typically not native code, so it needs mono.
I’ve run .zip installs on Windows and Linux. I think a full .zip content is what autoupdate installs.
Exploring FreeNAS and TrueNAS posts (which you’ll possibly have to do) shows it worked here:

@Dilby

It was fairly trivial to getting it running under FreeNAS. Simply a pkg install of mono followed by unzipping the zip version of Duplicati to a folder.

@Kahomono

YET ANOTHER variable into the mix

is avoided. I guess you’re installing to a jail? There are forum posts on setting up needed access.

TrueNAS SCALE 21.04 makes its Debut is their new Linux-based version (adds new challenges).
SCALE App package for TrueNAS SCALE #4425 mentions, but lack of resources gets in the way.

[Kahomono]

TrueNAS Core, yes, that’s the one I was trying.

[Kahomono]

The problem may have been permissions. Also, TrueNAS is not showing me great stability but so far I am just running it in VBox, not on real metal. The metal arrives next week

[tsfadmin]

Not sure what the outcome of this thread was but fast forward to TrueNAS 13.x and installs of the Duplicati Community Plugin provided with the installation. I had installed this plugin a year ago and was concerned that the project was not moving past it’s current status (2.0.6.3 beta) and was happy to find that there have been updates that can be installed. Unfortunately, some will try this in their install by setting the repo to Canary and get a bunch of Cert errors.

After a little more research on this topic I discovered that the files in the install folder are the same as what are provided in the “Zip” download and can be easily used to update to the current Canary version (2.0.6.104_canary_2022-06-15) by simply downloading the zip version of this, extract it and overwrite all of the folders and binaries in the jail.

For me, I simply stopped the jail, logged in to WinSCP and navigated to the jail folder where Duplicati was installed (/mnt/[your pool]/iocage/jails/duplicati/root/usr/local/share/duplicati) and made a copy of the folder (duplicati_bak). Since any existing backup DB’s are stored under (/mnt/[your pool]/iocage/jails/duplicati/root/config), this remained untouched. Only time the DB would be a concern is if the update you are trying to get to, also updated the DB engine.

After I replaced the existing files and folders with the Canary version, I started the Jail up and logged in to find that my existing configs were intact and was now in a new version.

Ideally I’d prefer to install Duplicati manually in a new jail but just couldn’t cobble the steps together to get that done and all I kept finding was references to the plugin (not very helpful). And unfortunately the Windows version works and updates much better but I didn’t want the backup application tied to a windows install.

Hope this helps anyone in the same boat as I was.

[jg3]

Hi there.

I built a TrueNAS Core jail with Duplicati and got it working. Here is a link to my notes on how I did it:

Backup: Installing Duplicati into a TrueNAS Jail

I have only been able to try it in my own single environment so far, so I will be grateful for any feedback from this community. I was in a similar boat, having run Duplicati on a TrueNAS jail before the plugin was an option, then trying the plugin, then finding out it didn’t work properly. I really like the way Duplicati works and it won’t do to be stuck without my backup system.

Lastly, I can’t get the service duplicati stop command to work at all, it seems to be selecting the wrong pid to kill.

Oh, and I didn’t go in for creating an SSL cert and all that, should be a nice upgrade for the next version.

[ts678]

@jg3

Lastly, I can’t get the service duplicati stop command to work at all, it seems to be selecting the wrong pid to kill.

There was some discussion and seemingly successful results from a revised script in the topic below:

Running Duplicati on startup on Freenas / FreeBSD

Alright, so I took a stab at changing the rc script’s behavior, and it turns out you can just define what happens when you run service foo stop by defining stop_cmd=baz and defining baz() { /bin/pkill -P $(cat ${pidfile}); } This in turn makes the rc script use that command to kill the process(es). Voila: #!/bin/sh # # PROVIDE: duplicati # REQUIRE: LOGIN # KEYWORD: shutdown # Enable duplicati: # sysrc duplicati_enable="YES" # # Optional parameters: # sysrc duplicati_user="<user to run as>"…

I have nothing FreeBSD based here, and exhausted what I could figure out about it in the above topic.