The Veritas RALUS Is A Joke

Other than having zero-day exploits and such, Symantec Backup Exec, aka Veritas Backup Exec, aka Veritas, aka VERBEX is a pretty decent backup system. Except if you have to use the Linux/Unix agent (RALUS) on a Slackware box. The RALUS comes as an RPM, which is a tad presumptuous of the package builders. A lot of Linux distros like Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, Ubuntu, etc. don't use RPM as their package management system. That's a Good Thing™ if you ask me. RPM is evil, and must be stopped.

Anyway. So I couldn't use the install script on the Veritas RALUS CD, because it did this:

error: Failed dependencies:
VRTSvxmsa = 4.2.1- is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
ld-linux.so.2 is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libcrypt.so.1 is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libc.so.6 is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libdl.so.2 is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libm.so.6 is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libpthread.so.0 is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
librt.so.1 is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libcrypt.so.1(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1.2) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1.3) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libdl.so.2(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libdl.so.2(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libm.so.6(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.0) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
libpthread.so.0(GLIBC_2.2) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
librt.so.1(GLIBC_2.1) is needed by VRTSralus-10.00.5629-0
Cannot install VRTSralus

Grrreeeeaaatttt... Because Slackware's packages aren't RPM-based (they are tar-gz-based) RPM doesn't think it has the necessary dependencies to install the RALUS. Of course the system has libc6! In fact, it has every one of these dependencies. So, I do rpm -ivh --nodeps --force and it installs. Ohhhhhh soooo naughty of me!

Next, I go in to /etc/rc.d and look at the init script for the RALUS that got put in there. I run it with 'start' as the argument, and it just sits there like a dumb turd and fails with no explanation. I look around the file system for the binary, and run that with it's switch that dumps debugging output to the command line. Everything works from there. So I write my own init script, and that works fine. Problem two solved. I look at the horrible documentation on the Veritas web site, and lo and behold you have to open up TCP 10000, which seems pretty much standard for Veritas. So I do that.

Now, the thing is started, and you can connect to it with the Veritas Backup Exec server software. At least, you can after you massage it in to deciding that it needs new, separate, non-default credentials to log in to your RALUS agent. However, when you run a backup job, it bails with the very non-helpful "A communication error has occurred." message. When you search for this in the Veritas documentation, it gives you some shit about an M: drive on an Exchange Server. WTF?!?!!!

So, I reluctantly take down my firewall and run the job again, except this time i've got netstat -avc > netstatdump.txt running, and then I grep that for the hostname of my backup server. Lo and behold, praise Jesus, it's got something connected to port 32871. So I open that up, re-enable the firewall, and try again. Failure. WTF this time?

Now it's listening on a different port, in a relatively narrow range with 32871. So I open up the range. So far, so good. Thanks, Veritas, that was about as fun as having my wisdom teeth pulled without any valium.