Installing Crashplan on ARM based QNAP

The downside of living in the boonies in the UK is that the broadband speeds can be a little on the rubbish side. When I moved to my current house 4 years ago, I knew I'd be giving up good internet for for something a bit lacking. I just didn't think it would take so long to get something better going. This is yesterday's speedtest:

Since a nice man from BT is due to visit tomorrow to sort me out with that “something better”, I can finally take advantage of some of the cloud offerings that really haven't been practical until now. Foremost amongst these offerings for me is the ability to backup all of the photos and files that my family and I have created or acquired over the years. They are all stored on a 4-year old QNAP NAS.

Super! I thought that I'd slip Crashplan on to the NAS and set it to backup overnight. Give it a few weeks and the backups would be up to date. A weight off my mind.

Except that getting it all running wasn't totally straightforward…

JRE Needed

Crashplan has been packaged as a QNAP QPKG file and is available to download from the QNAP forum here. It has a dependency on Java however and so a supported JRE must be installed and enabled before it can even be installed. There is one available for ARM based QNAPs in the AppCenter. However, after installing it I couldn't confirm that it was running for some reason. Connecting via SSH and executing “java -version” didn't have the desired results.

It seems that I wasn't the only one to hit this issue. Instead of installing the package directly through the AppCenter though it is possible to download the package and then install it manually. Simply select the package in AppCenter and click the download link.

Once downloaded, use the “Install Manually” option in AppCenter and select the unzipped file you just downloaded.

With that done, checking the java version again yielded the desired result:

[text][~] # java -version
java version "1.8.0" Java(TM) SE Embedded Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0-b132, headless)
Java HotSpot(TM) Embedded Client VM (build 25.0-b70, mixed mode)[/text]

Wrong JRE?

With the JRE installed, I thought that this would be fairly easy. Again using “Install Manually” in the AppCenter, I gave my NAS the Crashplan QPKG. It failed.

Just in case it would give me some more information, I copied the QPKG file to a share on the NAS and tried via the command line:

[text][/share/Public] # sh ./CrashPlan_3.6.3_30_arm-x19.qpkg
Install QNAP package on TS-NAS…
./
./qinstall.sh
./qpkg.cfg
./package_routines
917+1 records in
917+1 records out
19288+1 records in
19288+1 records out
CrashPlan 3.6.3_30 installation failed. The following QPKG must be installed and enabled: JRE >= 1.6.
Installation Abort.[/text]

Hmm. But we have a JRE. What's up? It's tenuous, but the error message suggests that the JRE QPKG can't be found, it's not complaining that Java itself isn't present.

Tenuous but true as it turns out. I did a little experimentation. There is a file on the NAS that contains details about the packages installed. It can be found at /etc/config/qpkg.conf.

I used vi to edit the file and replaced this section:

[text][JRE_ARM]
Name = JRE_ARM
Version = 8.0.1
Author = Optimus
QPKG_File = JRE_ARM.qpkg
Date = 2014-08-30
Shell = /share/MD0_DATA/.qpkg/JRE_ARM/jre.sh
Install_Path = /share/MD0_DATA/.qpkg/JRE_ARM
RC_Number = 101
Enable = TRUE
Status = complete[/text]

With the following:

[text][JRE]
Name = JRE
Version = 8.0.1
Author = Optimus
QPKG_File = JRE_ARM.qpkg
Date = 2014-08-30
Shell = /share/MD0_DATA/.qpkg/JRE_ARM/jre.sh
Install_Path = /share/MD0_DATA/.qpkg/JRE_ARM
RC_Number = 101
Enable = TRUE
Status = complete[/text]

Bazinga!

Once the AppCenter page was refreshed, “JRE_ARM” had been replaced by “JRE”. And this time, Crashplan installed correctly:

[text][/etc/config] # sh /share/Public/CrashPlan_3.6.3_30_arm-x19.qpkg
Install QNAP package on TS-NAS…
./
./qinstall.sh
./qpkg.cfg
./package_routines
917+1 records in
917+1 records out
19288+1 records in
19288+1 records out
Starting CrashPlan once to generate config files…
CrashPlan is disabled.
Forcing startup…
Cleaning /tmp/*.jna files…
Cleaning /share/MD0_DATA/.qpkg/CrashPlan/tmp/ files…
Starting CrashPlan…
Link service start/stop script: crashplan.sh
Set QPKG information in /etc/config/qpkg.conf
CrashPlan 3.6.3_30 has been installed in /share/MD0_DATA/.qpkg/CrashPlan.[/text]

All that remained was to set the correct IP address on my NAS for Crashplan to listen on and then I could connect and configure it via the client software on my laptop.

The only thing now is to wait for my broadband to be upgraded tomorrow…