I figured that if I keep talking about backups on this website I had better have a pretty good setup in place at home. This isn’t something that I took lightly either, it needed to be flawless, automatic, easy and reliable. So I considered all of my options from scripts, applications, image based backups.
After much, much thought I decided on Backup Exec 2012 as the backup product. This was because I was given a Vray licence for Sys Admin Day a few years back and I had experience with Backup Exec. For my windows machines it was all very smooth but as always in IT, I ran into an issue. My issue was performing a Granular backup on my Linux machines.
My Linux machines are all Ubuntu 12.04 or higher. These run kernel 3.x which is unsupported by Backup Exec 2012. So after much searching, looking through logs, and testing this method I now have RALUS working reliably on all of my Linux machines with kernel 3 or higher using backup exec 2012. (Please not this method will NOT be supportable)
Perform the RALUS install on the machine.
- You will need perl switch –
sudo apt-get install libswitch-perl
- Install RALUS using the instructions at http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=tech46461
- During the install make sure you take note of the system name. This is very important that the name in backup exec matches this.
- Choose not to start the agent at the end of the install.
Patch the libbesocket.so file to allow the agent to run
This was very difficult to track down as the website that explains the process is no longer available. I managed to track down a copy on Web Archive at http://web.archive.org/web/20140417140141/http://blog.redweb.at/2012/08/howto-backupexec-2012-linux-agent-and-kernel-3-0-debian/#comment-209
Once patched you can start the agent by running /etc/init.d/VRTSralus.init start
Add the backup user to the beoper group
You will need to add the user you want to use to perform the backup to the beoper group by running
sudo usermod -a -G group user Add the machine to Backup Exec
- Once the agent is installed and working skip over to backup exec and add the server using the wizard.
- Establish the trust relationship with the server.
- Make sure the name of the machine is the name that was used in the first step on this page. (i.e. add manual host file entries if necessary)
Create the backup
Once that is all done and dusted, you can go and create the backup schedule as required.