Tuesday, June 7, 2022

Synology DSM and Veeam 11

For a long time, Veeam has been telling its users to not use "low-end NAS boxes" (eg, Synology, QNAP, Thecus) as backup repositories for Backup & Replication (VBR), even though these Linux-based devices should be compatible if they have "x86" architecture (as opposed to ARM).

The reality is that none of these devices use "bog standard" Linux distributions, and due to their appliance-based nature, have some significant limitations on what can be done to their custom distributions.

However, there are many folks—both as home users or within small/budget-limited businesses—who are willing to "take their lumps" and give these things a shot as repositories.

I am one of them, particularly for my home "lab" environment. I've written about this use case (in particular, the headaches) a couple of times in this blog [1, 2], and this post joins them, addressing yet another fix/workaround that I've had to implement.

Background

I use a couple of different Synology boxes for backup purposes, but the one I'm dealing with today is the DS1817+. It has a 10GbE interface for connectivity to my network, a quad-core processor (the Intel Atom C2538) and 8GB RAM (upgradable to 16GB, but I haven't seen the demand that would require it). It is populated with 8x1TB SATA SSDs for ~6TB of backup capacity.

I upgraded DSM to 7.0 a while back, and had to make some adjustments to the NFS target service to continue to support ESXi datastores via NFS 4.1

Yesterday, I updated it to 7.1-42661 Update 2, and was greeted to a number of failed backup jobs this morning.

Symptoms

All the failed jobs have uniform symptoms: Timeout to start agent

With further investigation, I saw that my DS1817+ managed server was "not available", and when attempting to get VBR to re-establish control, kept getting the same error with the installation of transport services:

Installing Veeam Data Mover service Error: Failed to invoke command /opt/veeam/transport/veeamtransport --install 6162:  /opt/veeam/transport/veeamtransport: error while loading shared libraries: libacl.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Failed to invoke command /opt/veeam/transport/veeamtransport --install 6162:  opt/veeam/transport/veeamtransport: error while loading shared libraries: libacl.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Workaround

After failing to find a fix after some Linux-related searches, I discovered a thread on the Veeam Community Forum that addressed this exact issue [3]. 

This is apparently a known issue with VBR11 and Synology boxes, and as Veeam is moving further and further away from the "on the fly" deployment of the transport agent to a permanently-installed "Data Mover" daemon (which is necessary to provide the Immutable Backup feature), it becomes a bigger issue. Veeam has no control over the distribution—and would just as soon have clients use other architectures—and Synology would probably be happy with customers considering their own backup tool over competing options...

At any rate, some smart people posted workarounds to the issue after doing their own research, and I'm re-posting for my own reference because it worked for me.

  1. Download the latest ACL library from Debian source mirrors. The one I used—and the one in the Forum thread—is http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/acl/libacl1_2.2.53-10_amd64.deb
  2. Unpack the .deb file using 7zip
  3. Upload the data.tar file to your Synology box. Feel free to rename the file to retain your sanity; I did.
  4. Extract the tarball to the root directory using the "-C /" argument:
    tar xvf data.tar -C /
  5. If you are using a non-root account to do this work, you'll need to use "sudo" to write to the root. You will also need to adjust owner/permissions on the extracted directories & files:
    sudo tar xvf data.tar -C /
    sudo chown -R root:root /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
    sudo chmod -R 755 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
  6. Create soft links for these files in the boxes filesystem:
    sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libacl.so.1 /usr/lib/libacl.so.1
    sudo ln -sf /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libacl.so.1.1.2253 /usr/lib/libacl.so.1.1.2253
  7. Last, get rid of any previous "debris" from failed transport installations
    sudo rm -R /opt/veeam
Once the Synology is prepped, you must go back into VBR and re-synchronize with the Linux repository:
  1. Select the "Backup Infrastructure" node in the VBR console
  2. Select the Linux node under Managed Servers
  3. Right-click on the Synology box being updated and select "Properties..." from the popup menu.
  4. Click [Next >] until the only option is [Finish]. On the way, you should see that the Synology is correctly identified as a compatible Linux box, and the new Data Mover transport service is successfully installed.

Summary

I can't guarantee that this will work after a future update of DSM, and there may come a day when other libraries are "broken" by updates to VBR or DSM. But this workaround was successful for me.

Update

The workaround has persisted through a set of updates to DSM7. I have seen this come up with DSM6, but this workaround does not work on that; too many platform incompatibilities, I suspect. Need to do some more research & experimentation for DSM6...

26 comments:

  1. thans for sharing your tips you can also visit my website
    jual ipal

    ReplyDelete
  2. It wrecked my Synology so it would not start ... appears to break the softlinks for the /bin folder. Ended setting up DSM again, recovering my data files, and restoring config.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thank you. Worked wonderfully.

    Just a heads up to those trying to follow on later installs:
    I tried using a newer version of libacl.so.1 but that lead to new errors like these:
    veeamtransport: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.33' not found (required by /lib64/libacl.so.1)
    Going back to 1.1.2253 fixed that.

    This was on a Synology DS1815+ running DSM 7.1.1-42962 Update 3

    ReplyDelete
  4. Is there alternative method for backup repositories & Replication (VBR)?

    Ghie News
    Konveksi Murah Bandung
    Batu Alam Cirebon

    ReplyDelete
  5. Agen Slot Joker123 Terpercaya adalah situs yang menyediakan permainan mesin slot online dari provider joker gaming tanpa kekalahan yang sudah dipercaya oleh masyarakat Indonesia.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks to Akun Super Maxwin Gacor for this article

    ReplyDelete
  7. Cửa Hàng Đặc sản Bình Định Biển Xanh
    Chuyên cung cấp sỉ hải sản khô Bình Định như: cá khô, mực khô, tôm khô,... Và các loại quà bánh đặc sản Bình Định như: chả ram tôm đất, nem, tré, bánh ít, bánh hồng giá tại xưởng.
    Địa chỉ: 53 Nguyễn Lạc, Tp Quy Nhơn, Tỉnh Bình Định
    Hotline: 0907.473.418
    Thời gian làm việc: 5h - 20h (Thứ 2 - CN)
    Email: dacsanbinhdinhbienxanh@gmail.com
    Site: https://dacsanbienxanh.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thank you Jim for this Veeam update! Much appreaciated.

    Regards,

    Baba Vanga

    ReplyDelete
  9. kambing qurban purwokertoMay 18, 2023 at 11:42 AM

    Thank you

    ReplyDelete
  10. Yakanghimet useful page, thank you for sharing, my knowledge has increased

    ReplyDelete
  11. Dilifeone - Thanks admin, I've shared here. continued success of this site. amen

    ReplyDelete
  12. https://cacanh77bd.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  13. Impressed with Nation Security's unwavering commitment to safeguarding our nation's critical assets and infrastructure.

    ReplyDelete
  14. At Nation Security, it is our privilege to serve and protect our clients. We provide quality, licensed Security Officers, and we service all 50 states. With over twenty 25 years of Security, Law Enforcement, and Military experience, Asdel Vazquez President and Chief Executive Officer committed to providing the best possible service to serve your particular security needs. Nation Security commit to providing our clients with the highest level of service available in the industry, and we apply the most advanced technologies and logistical processes to our operations. We take pride in providing our clients with quality and professional service at reasonable and competitive rates.

    ReplyDelete