Re: tarsnap on Windows Server 2012 R2

[Paul Takemura <paul@awasebyte.com>]

I tried an older version of tarsnap (1.0.37), but the results were the same, with tarsnap hanging.

So, I switched to another VM, one that is hosted in Microsoft Azure. I opened outbound port 5279 in the Azure firewall, and left the Windows firewall off. 

This time, I installed the 64-bit version of Cygwin (instead of the 32-bit version) and the various required packages -- gcc-core, make, openssl-devel, zlib-devel, openssl, and gnupg.

tarsnap 1.0.39 was compiled.

tarsnap no longer hangs, and seems to be working normally. I was able to retrieve a previously stored archive.

I'll try again on Alibaba Cloud.


​Paul Takemura


‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On July 23, 2018 7:42 AM, Paul Takemura <paul@awasebyte.com> wrote:

> ​​
> 
> At several points I confess to have deleted files from the cache, to attempt to start-from-scratch, but I've restored it now, using the --fsck option.
> 
> Administrator@ab-1 /usr/local/tarsnap-cache
> 
> $ whoami
> 
> Administrator
> 
> Administrator@ab-1 /usr/local/tarsnap-cache
> 
> $ ls -l
> 
> total 2
> 
> lrwxrwxrwx 1 Administrator None 64 Jul 23 07:09 cseq -> d69979bf2f84c1ace96e5dcbb137ce25987dc18d493b4f559d960bba2999a55e
> 
> -rw-r--r-- 1 Administrator None 24 Jul 23 07:09 directory
> 
> -rw-r--r-- 1 Administrator None 0 Jul 22 11:51 lockf
> 
> Also, at one point a couple of days ago, I suspected network issues and, so, created explicit outbound rules to allow connection to port 9279 on the internal firewall (Windows Server) and the external firewall (Alibaba Cloud). I then tested the ability to get outside by setting up netcat listening on port 9279 on an external server and connecting to that from the Windows machine.
> 
> I rebooted the Windows machine after making the firewall changes.
> 
> It did seem that some kind of connection had been made to a Tarsnap server, but in my quest for A-Z satisfaction I deleted whatever bits were there using tarsnap -d and also, later, tarsnap --nuke.
> 
> I will look more closely at the Alibaba Cloud firewall, and yes, I can try an older version of tarsnap.
> 
> Paul
> 
> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> 
> On July 23, 2018 12:18 AM, Colin Percival cperciva@tarsnap.com wrote:
> 
> > On 07/22/18 01:05, Paul Takemura wrote:
> > 
> > > tarsnap-keygen seems to work fine too (exit code is 0).
> > > 
> > > Unfortunately, tarsnap seems to hang when using the -c option. I see that data
> > > 
> > > has been written to the cache directory, but that may only be the metadata, I
> > > 
> > > don't know.
> > 
> > Can you show me a listing of that directory?
> > 
> > > Does anyone have experience using tarsnap on Windows Server R2 and Cygwin?
> > > 
> > > Here is an example invocation of tarsnap that hangs:
> > > 
> > > Administrator@ab-1 ~
> > > 
> > > $ tarsnap -c --dry-run -v -C /home/Administrator/ -f ab-1-1807221600 paultemp
> > 
> > Interesting. Can you try an earlier version of tarsnap in case we broke
> > 
> > something?
> > 
> > The most common cause for "tarsnap-keygen works but tarsnap doesn't" is
> > 
> > network MTU issues -- but that (a) shouldn't be a problem on cloud systems,
> > 
> > and (b) should eventually produce errors with tarsnap can't communicate with
> > 
> > the server. Simply hanging is not a symptom I've heard about before.
> > 
> > Colin Percival
> > 
> > Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
> > 
> > Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid