Official Crashplan Plug-in Documentation

[bluonek]

Does official Crashplan plug-in documentation exist for FreeNAS? While there seem to be plenty of disparate guides (some with conflicting information) and scattered forum posts I've been unsuccessful in finding something complete, end-to-end and/or official.

While I love the idea of a BSD / ZFS based NAS, a fully usable Crashplan implementation is a requirement. Was exited to see the official FreeNAS website advertising the existence of a Crashplan plug-in. Hoping to find documentation that makes me comfortable moving from our current Linux / XFS solution.

thnx
b1k

 

[dlavigne]

Not really, other than this note in the official docs:

While the FreeNAS® Plugins system makes it easy to install software, it is still up to you to know how to configure and use the installed application. When in doubt, refer to the documentation for that application.

This is due to the number of plugins, their varying degrees of existing documentation, and the size of the FreeNAS docs (~300 pages).

 

[Ericloewe]

In principle, assuming the versions for Linux and FreeBSD match, the documentation for a certain version should be identical. However, that's something I'd ask on the Crashplan forums (if there is such a thing).

 

[bluonek]

Not really, other than this note in the official docs:

While the FreeNAS® Plugins system makes it easy to install software, it is still up to you to know how to configure and use the installed application. When in doubt, refer to the documentation for that application.

This is due to the number of plugins, their varying degrees of existing documentation, and the size of the FreeNAS docs (~300 pages).

Right, makes sense. After spending a few more hours on the forums and taking time to digest the many repetitive and mostly misinforming threads, read through some external guides, weed out some insecure suggestions/steps, figure out reasonably secure alternative steps, and then finally doing more research on solutions to a common/repeating upgrade issue - I have Crashplan working. =)

With that said, I'd like to suggest (ask politely?) that each FreeNAS plug-in has it's own sub forum. This way we could, for example, create a sticky for a given plug-in. In this case the hours of research I did could have been a simple 20 minute read in the form of a continuously updated "How-to install" sticky post. Also as a benefit to the gurus here, it would prevent the cross chatter and redundant questions to common questions due to this void.

Now the gurus could validly remark "did you rtfm AND did you read the sticky post?". =) I'd be happy to help btw, though not too interesting in creating yet another external disparate blog post - YAEDBP (see, even the acronym doesn't roll off the tongue so well)

thnx
b1k

 

[cyberjock]

With that said, I'd like to suggest (ask politely?) that each FreeNAS plug-in has it's own sub forum. This way we could, for example, create a sticky for a given plug-in. In this case the hours of research I did could have been a simple 20 minute read in the form of a continuously updated "How-to install" sticky post. Also as a benefit to the gurus here, it would prevent the cross chatter and redundant questions to common questions due to this void.

Great idea, in theory. The problem is that FreeNAS is designed to accept PC-BSD PBIs also. There's about 10000 of them. Clearly that's unsustainable. The number of PBIs available is also growing (which a major surge expected in FreeNAS 10). There's a point at which having 100+ sections is unsustainable.

The whole goal when FreeNAS chose to use PBIs was to make it compatible with PC-BSD. PC-BSD is growing and they've got a huge base of PBIs. If you know what you are doing they are apparently trivial to install and use. I haven't tried myself because I'd rather run jails I manage myself than rely on PBIs.

 

[bluonek]

Great idea, in theory. The problem is that FreeNAS is designed to accept PC-BSD PBIs also. There's about 10000 of them. Clearly that's unsustainable. The number of PBIs available is also growing (which a major surge expected in FreeNAS 10). There's a point at which having 100+ sections is unsustainable.

The whole goal when FreeNAS chose to use PBIs was to make it compatible with PC-BSD. PC-BSD is growing and they've got a huge base of PBIs. If you know what you are doing they are apparently trivial to install and use. I haven't tried myself because I'd rather run jails I manage myself than rely on PBIs.

Interesting, I didn't realize PBIs were a BSD concept. Surly I'll also be part of the "I'll make my own damn jails" group in the near future. But that's me, not average Joe pretty technical user person.

So this is my last attempt, I won't fight you (the FreeBSD forum gurus) on this any further. As far as I can tell there are currently 14 plug-ins advertised on the FreeBSD website and 22 plug-ins in the packaged repository. This certainly seems manageable - ok, ok, easy for the guy who isn't managing it to say, I get it - but still, give the community a place to deep dive into the packaged plug-ins and give the forum mods a place to "sticky" plug-in specific posts that would help the 90%+ users installing a given plug-in for the first time.

I can see it now:
sticky - How to securely install the Crashplan plug-in
sticky - How to fix and prevent the Crashplan upgrade of death

=)

 

[cyberjock]

Actually, it's messier than that. The PBIs are often not even from iXsystems. A few are, but many of the more popular ones are from users like @Joshua Parker Ruehlig and so we don't want to get in the habit of being some kind of official support structure for a PBI that we simply publish for users. We already have enough problems separating what is "iXsystems stuff" from "everyone else's stuff".

If you look in bugs.freenas.org there's tickets from Joshua asking for the PBI to be updated in the repository and such.

I forget which PBI it was, but one of them broke earlier this year and people were *really* vocal about it, writing up tickets and such. Of course, iXsystems was closing the tickets to "3rd party to resolve" because it wasn't a PBI maintained by iXsystems so they don't have any control over it. Needless to say those users weren't happy. Most of them realized that PBIs can be pretty limiting and decided to be a real man and use a full-fledged jail. I think you're coming around to it to.

To be honest, jails really aren't as bad as you might think. If you are willing to spend some time learning how to use pkg-ng and stuff it gets pretty easy to make things work how you want. The best part is once you've figured out the basics you can apply that info for many jails and only have to worry about specifics for a given application.

But, the PBIs are push-button installations. They're like being give the first hit of cocaine for free. You want more and more until you realize that cocaine is for kids. Real men want the heroine!

 

[sremick]

Real men want the heroine!

Indeed we do. ;)

 

[PenalunWil]

I'd be happy to help btw, though not too interesting in creating yet another external disparate blog post - YAEDBP (see, even the acronym doesn't roll off the tongue so well)

thnx
b1k

Even so there are newbies here desperately searching the forum and other places looking for the definitive solution to setting up their Crash Plan backup solution (me included ;) ) who would really appreciate your YAEDBP and who knows it might get voted "Thread of the Year" award and end up as a sticky ;) .

Yours... another confused prospective Crashplan user :(

 

[Andrew076]

I recent setup crash plan and found this YouTube video the best help! I did my setup in a fresh install etc. and it worked perfectly.