Slackware Support

[marius402]

Hi Guys,

Can anyone give any advice if a hardware server with Slackware can be backed up by Veeam VBR? According to what I can see @ https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=50 it states that "Linux kernel version 2.6.32 or later is supported", but does not name Slackware specifically.

Any comments, tips, tricks and traps using VBR? The customer already has a significant investment in Veeam, but cannot use anything else but Slackware for a specific purpose

Regards

Marius

[HannesK]

Hello,
I moved your question from VMware to Linux / Mac / AIX / Solaris forum.

but does not name Slackware specifically

yes, that's because it's unsupported. We only list distributions that are supported (not hundreds of distributions that are unsupported)

There are several options
1) export the needed data with NFS and use NAS-backup instead of Veeam Agent for Linux (that method is fully supported)
2) try using NAS backup from a managed server without NFS export. That probably works
3) I heard this works, but of course also unsupported. Quote from internal post from November 2020

If it's 32-bit, or 64-bit and you really want to try using VAL, then your best bet is to use RHEL6 packages and rpm2tgz to convert it to tgz package format used by Slackware. Why the RHEL6 versions? Because Slackware does not use systemd so it will be far easier to use packages from a distro that was pre-systemd, although you'll probably still need to manually create an rc.veeamservice file in Slackware to start the service.

I'd guess that doing that would be enough to get the base VAL installed, however, you'll also need to manually build the veeamsnap module. Probably here the easiest is just to pull down the latest from github and compile it manually. I'm still not sure if it will work though, mainly due to missing tools and pre-LSB file structure and things like the old school bootloader. I'm just not sure VAL would deal with any of that well.

I managed to get a Slackware 14.2 system to install VAL and for a backup to run successfully using pretty much the technique I outlined above. It didn't take much really, but of course it is completely unsupported. [...]

The biggest issue was actually that my test system only had a single mount for the root filesystem and it mounts to /dev/root and VAL couldn't figure out if there was space free or not because it couldn't figure out that /dev/root (reported by df) and /dev/sda1 (reported by mount) were the same actual disk so it didn't think it had enough free space to hold a snapshot. The easy fix was to just add a second disk and mount it, which I'm sure any real production system would already have.

The system had kernel 4.4, but I'm sure there'd be no issue with 4.9 since I just compiled veeamsnap from source. I haven't tried any recoveries, but the RHEL6 packages mostly "just worked" as expected.

Best regards,
Hannes

[marius402]

Thank you Hannes