How to repair Backuppc on Ubuntu 12.04

Arrrgh

After upgrading to the latest 12.04 – which in itself was a difficult affair – I discovered a massive issue. Backuppc was failing! I was receiving this error.

 NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED listing \\* 

So first I checked the configuration, but as I hadn’t changed anything I was completely mystified what was going wrong.

Searching

So I googled the error and I got a whole lot of posts where people had the same issue as me. There is even a problem log in launchpad. (link)

The culprit was a bug in samba, particularily the way it exposed folders in the exclude list.

Cure

The cure is move down to the previous samba. Sounds simple doesn’t it. But if you’re not a Linux guru that task isn’t the simplest. Have faith, because the great guys at tolaris.com have put up this fix.

Simply follow the steps there and restart samba and you are ready to go. The only change I made was to subtitute the hold feature of aptitude instead of the echo cmd they use to prevent samba from being updated in the future.

 sudo aptitude hold samba 

And now my backups are back and running. Now to figure out why the backup server doesn’t always boot clean. sigh.