Hi,
I have installed Duplicati V2 on a ubuntu 16 system and I’m struggling with some elements!
What I dont understand is;
1, why in the advanced options there isn’t a setting for which user it’s to run under? For example as a backup server there really isn’t any point running this software for backup unless it has full access to all the home/user folders!
2, I followed the headless install guide for debian (I assumed Ubuntu was similar) however I can’t seem to establish which user it’s running as again none of that information is availible in the localhost:8200 site. Why is this information not there?
I must also point out that I use this software on windows machines and it works superbly and without any issues.
Many thanks,
Frustrated linux newbie and Duplicati user.
By the time the advanced options are loaded the Duplicati server is already running as a user and Duplicati can’t change user.
On your Ubuntu system you should edit the systemd unit file to change user of the service /lib/systemd/system/duplicati.service. You can add a row User=username below the [Service] entry and systemd will try to start it under that user.
Hmm, I guess it would make sense to have the service username available in the web UI. You can get the information from the command-line by using `ps aux | grep duplicati’ which will show the user in the first column, but that’s Linux specific, so it would be different on Windows.
Thanks for the pointers,
I ran ps aux | grep duplicati and got;
root 1064 0.0 1.6 1062100 63356 ? Ssl 18:34 0:01 DuplicatiServer /usr/lib/duplicati/Duplicati.Server.exe --webservice-port=8200 --webservice-interface=any
blah 4444 1.2 4.1 2246760 160108 ? Sl 18:36 0:36 Duplicati /usr/lib/duplicati/Duplicati.GUI.TrayIcon.exe
blah 5432 0.0 0.0 12948 1016 pts/0 S+ 19:23 0:00 grep --color=auto duplicati
So I guess it;s running as a root, now I need to get it to read all the files and backup as root. I fired it up with the regular icon and the backup I setup still fails with read error/file permissions. It does look like it runs the backup as user; blah not root.
This is very hard work! I find Linux needlessly hardwork (the server versions) to do what should be a very simple task!
The learning curve is a bit steep in the beginning. Even for simple stuff 
Eventually it becomes more natural and suddenly you can do very complex things easily
It kind of looks like you have both a server and a tray icon running as different users. If they are launched independently then the trayicon may be launching it’s own server. If there are two servers one will be on port 8200 and one on 8300. That could cause it to look as if the server isn’t root (because it really is running as a different user and there is a different server running as root)
In any case the trayicon isn’t very useful on a headless server, so you can make sure to just launch the server in the systemd unit file:
ExecStart=/usr/bin/duplicati-server $DAEMON_OPTS
/usr/bin/duplicati-server starts without the trayicon while /usr/bin/duplicati will start the trayicon, which then starts the duplicati-server itself.
1 Like
Many thanks for your encouragement, it does get easier as one gains experience.
I seem to have it working now. It initially chucked a ssh error which was due to me neglecting to add the user to the group on the destination directory.
So far so good it seems to be well on with backing up.
Many thanks for the help and pointers :)
1 Like
I agree, though I haven’t considered possible security / privacy issues…
However, I’m somewhat surprised it’s not shown on the About → “System info” page…
Personally I’d like the spot where it shows Canary / Experimental to also show “server” or “tray icon”.
@quadpr5, glad to hear you got it working (and that Linux is coming a little bit easier to you). I went ahead and flagged our “SSH error” post as the solution.
I think between the machine name and the variables containing the full path to my home dir (including the username), I think we’re pretty safe to display the username 
When I get system info in debug mode it shows the wrong version, but I added UserName and StartedBy variables now
StartedBy just defaults to Server and then the tray icon overwrites the field to Tray icon.
Pull request here: added 'UserName' and 'StartedBy' variables to the system info page by Pectojin · Pull Request #3096 · duplicati/duplicati · GitHub
1 Like
