Blksnap (Agent 6 for Linux) fails to build on current OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

[ascaris]

When I installed Veeam Agent 6 on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, kernel 6.1.10, it pulls in blksnap as a dependency as expected. It appears to install normally from the YAST package manager, but when I run the Veeam program (after working around another issue, where the job setup configurator won't accept a USB device as a backup target unless I mount it manually), it fails with "Could not find [veeamsnap] or [blksnap] modules."

A quick investigation reveals that the blksnap module did not build.

When I try to install the blksnap module from the command line:

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sudo zypper in --force blksnap

I get this error:

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WARNING: /usr/lib/dkms/common.postinst does not exist.
ERROR: DKMS version is too old and blksnap was not built with legacy DKMS support.
You must either rebuild blksnap with legacy postinst support or upgrade DKMS to a more current version.

The DKMS version installed in Tumbleweed is 2.8.8. It is not the newest DKMS version there is, but it is newer than that of nearly all Linux distros, so it seems to be an error somewhere rather than an actual requirement for a newer DKMS.

When I installed Veeam Agent on KDE Neon 22.04 (=Ubuntu 22.04), using Ubuntu's official 6.1 OEM kernel (the Dell XPS I am using did come with the OEM Ubuntu kernel from the factory!), blksnap installed and worked properly, though it is still necessary to use the workaround to get it to accept the USB drive as a backup target while setting up the backup job.

The DKMS version that worked nicely on that installation of Veeam Agent 6 is 2.8.7, which is older than the one it told me failed because it is "legacy DKMS."

Incidentally, using the mainline kernel 6.2 (RC7) with Neon (Ubuntu), it still built the module, loaded it, and began a backup without issue, despite blksnap officially only supporting kernels up to 6.1.

I was able to get the blksnap module built by downloading the source from Github and following the instructions, but while the module would appear to work at first, the Agent program itself generated this error when I attempted to create a backup:

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05:53:35         Job xps started at 2023-02-20 12:53:35 UTC
      05:53:35         [warn] Mount point for repository changed
      05:53:35         Preparing to backup
      05:53:37         [error] Failed to create volume snapshot                                                                                                              00:00:06
      05:53:43         [error] Failed to take volume snapshot
      05:53:43         [error] Failed to perform backup
      05:53:43         [error] Failed to load module [blksnap]
      05:53:43         [error] Processing finished with errors at 2023-02-20 12:53:43 UTC

That (like the failure to accept the USB external drive as a backup target) seems to be another issue, though.

Please advise which log files, etc. may be needed. Also, I can start threads on the other two issues if that would help.

[PTide]

Hi,

Well, the best what I can do is to ask our team internally. You may want to try and open a support case, but since Tumbleweed support status is experimental please don't expect wonders to happen : )
Please upload the whole log bundle somewhere and DM me the link.

Thanks!

[PTide]

UPDATE:

One of our folks (kudos to @musbka) figured out that something is wrong with DKMS that is available in Tumbleweed repo.

Please try these steps:

1) install DMKS from the repo

zypper in dkms

2) install git

zypper in git

3) Get dkms from git

git clone https://github.com/dell/dkms.git
cd dkms && make install

After that try to install blksnap and veeam again.

P.S. And make sure you have secureboot disabled. Otherwise you'll have to sign the freshly-built module and enroll the corresponding key shim to make it work.

Thanks!

[ascaris]

Thanks for the reply.

I figured it out before I had a chance to read the solution above.

It turns out that the Veeam install script looks for the generic post-inst script at /usr/lib/dkms, and if it does not find it there, that is when it generates the error message about DKMS being too old. In my Tumbleweed installation, there is no such folder... it's at /usr/libexec/dkms.

I created a symlink from /usr/lib/dkms to /usr/libexec/dkms, then removed & reinstalled blksnap. Now it works! It is performing a backup as I write this.

If the above solution (updating DKMS to a generic/non-SUSE version) works, it probably does it by putting the dkms folder at /usr/lib, where the blksnap installer expects it to be, or perhaps it does as I did and puts in a symlink. If it is the former, it runs the risk of the same problem in reverse, when some other dkms module expects things to be in the usual place for Tumbleweed, but they are not there. A symlink should be harmless, but the root problem is that the Veeam script expects the dkms folder to be somewhere other than where it is. Perhaps modify the install script to look in /usr/libexec if it fails to find it in /usr/lib?

[cloggy]

Other solution: I installed the version dkms 2.3-2.7 from software.opensuse.org and installation of veeam and blksnap went fine. Just completed my first backup w/o problems.

[BADwolf]

Hi all,
I have a Suse Linux tumbleweed. According to Veeam (V12), this is an unsupported OS and I can't install a client, let alone create backups.

It is a hardware client.

I have trieed a offline installation. Tumbleweed also represents an SMB share, on which I have placed the RPM file veeam-release-openSUSE-1.0.8-1.noarch.rpm - but I can't manage to access this SMB share and run it with zyper. Can anyone support here or has any ideas how I can create a backup of the server?

It would be nice if someone could support here

[HannesK]

Hello,
I cannot really follow the SMB share topic, but did you try out the things mentioned above?

NAS backup might also be an alternative as it has less (no if data is shared via SMB / NFS) dependencies.

Best regards,
Hannes

[PTide]

Hi,

What kind of errors do you see?

If you cannot access the package on your SMB share, try to pull it from here:
http://repository.veeam.com/backup/linu ... /rpm/suse/

But don't forget that Tumbleweed is no a supported distro (mostly due to the veeamsnap" kernel module).
There are two options:

a) you can forcibly break dependencies and install an rpm package from the repo

in this case the product will operate without snapshot capabilities

b) you can try and compile the kernel module manually and then install veeam package


Thanks!