Problems running as root

#1

I’m on Arch Linux and trying to backup some root dirs.

I have duplicati running as a service (sudo systemctl enable duplicati). Top command shows me (not root) as “User” for processes involving duplicati and mono-sgen.

I’m not quite sure how to proceed from here. I’m getting 106 errors due to access on my attempts to backup /etc/.

Thanks

#2

The user can be specified in the systemd file.

$ systemctl status duplicati
● duplicati.service - Duplicati web-server
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/duplicati.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)

Editing /usr/lib/systemd/system/duplicati.service so that it has the User=root variable defined under Service

[Unit]
Description=Duplicati web-server
After=network.target

[Service]
User=root
Nice=19
IOSchedulingClass=idle
EnvironmentFile=-/etc/sysconfig/duplicati
ExecStart=/usr/bin/duplicati-server $DAEMON_OPTS

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then reloading system and restarting Duplicati

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl restart duplicati.service
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#3

That did it. Thanks.

#4

Alright, this is weird.

I made the change to duplicati.service you suggested and it was working.

I had copied my ~/.config/Duplicati folder to /root/.config/Duplicati (so I didn’t have to recreate my profiles, etc) and was having success.

Then I wanted to pause duplicati and try to play some games (something is eating up my ram; is it mono-sgen, which keeps auto-spawning). I’m never to confident in the pause function, as it still displays transfer rates.

So I stopped the upload, then disabled and stopped duplicati.

When I restarted duplicati, my backup’s configuration was missing the source dirs added and other advanced option configurations changed while I was (I assume) running it as root.

It reverted back to running as a user. I can confirm this because:

  • removing contents of /home/user/.config/Duplicati removed my backup profiles from the web interface
  • copying contests of /root/.config/Duplicati to /home/user/.config/Duplicati reverted to the source dirs, advanced settings, etc I had changed while running as root.

my duplicati.service file:

[Unit]
Description=Duplicati
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mono /opt/duplicati-latest/Duplicati.Server.exe      --webservice-port=8200
Restart=on-failure
User=root
Group=duplicati

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

EDIT: It looks like I got it working again. I think what did it (but I’m not sure) is su to root, then start the service. Sudo systemctl didn’t seem to do it… which doesn’t seem quite right.

#5

It’s not necessary to su before starting the service, so this sounds pretty odd.

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#6

yeah, it doesn’t make a bit of sense to me. I’ll have to test some more. But I think I’ll wait till my backups are complete, as I don’t currently have a legitimate backup (just a sub folder on my local storage drive… bad form, I know. I have a separate drive that will be read-only (except when writing backups via rsync) on the way).

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