Rackspace Cloud Backup Agent resides on a variety of different Linux distributions, and may expand its support to FreeBSD in a near future. Unlike Windows (despite of Windows Store), these platforms all come with some form of "package management" systems, so that user can upgrade the backup agents through these systems. However, such upgrade tasks involve user interactions, while the practice we provide for Windows involves no user interactions, and has been proven to be more user-friendly and still robust. To delivery a more consistent and comprehensive user-experience package, we launch the auto-updater support on the Linux distributions.

In addition, due to the difference between the repository support of the package management systems, the steps to install the agent from scratch on a Linux box is even more complicated. This is also a problem which the auto-updater aims to solve.

• Distributions
  1. Redhat flavors
     • Fedora 18, 19, 20
     • RHEL 5, 6
     • CentOS 5, 6
     • Scientific Linux 6
  2. Debian flavors
     • Debian 6, 7
     • Ubuntu 10, 12, 13

• Python versions

  The auto-updater runs on the default Python implementation on each distribution, and such an implementation is required to be py2x. The following Python versions are supported:

  2.4, 2.5¹, 2.6, 2.7

• Redhat flavors
  1. Download the latest rpm package;
  2. sudo yum install cloudbackup-updater-<version>-2.noarch.rpm
• Debian flavors
  1. Download the latest deb package;
  2. sudo dpkg -i cloudbackup-updater_<version>-2_all.deb

This section describes the expected behavior of the auto-updater after the installation under different scenarios. Scenarios are the valid combinations of all the conditions. The exact behaviors are different with different package management systems, but the logic are the same.

Conditions:

1. The agent repository is correctly configured.
2. An agent is installed.
3. The installed agent is updated. Requires 2).
4. The installed agent is running. Requires 2).
5. The running agent is performing a backup, a restore, or a cleanup. Requires 4).

Behaviors:

If 1) is not true, then agent repository is configured.

Debian: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/driveclient.list is created and the command line output of sudo apt-key list contains the agent repo key.

Redhat: /etc/yum.repos.d/drivesrvr.repo is created.

[Note: A better approach to verify the existence of the repositories is to remove the installed agent then install it:

Debian: sudo apt-get remove driveclient, sudo apt-get install driveclient

Redhat: sudo yum remove driveclient, sudo yum install driveclient

Since there is no local package involved, the installation sources must be the repositories.

-- end note]

If 2) is not true, then the newest agent is installed from the repository.

[Note: The installation or upgrade of the agent does not block the installation of the auto-updater itself, so user might experience that the agent is installed or upgraded shortly after the auto-updater being installed. -- end note]

Debian: sudo dpkg-query -W driveclient shows the installed version.

Redhat: sudo yum info driveclient shows the installed version.

If 3) is true, do nothing.

Otherwise, if 4) is not true, the installed agent is updated to the latest version from the repository. The actual update may be delayed for some time if the updater is running as a daemon. See Usage for details.

Use the command showing the installed version to compare the agent version before and after the installation of the auto-updater.

[Note: To create a situation of "an old version of the agent is installed without a configured agent repository", download an old deb or rpm agent package and install them. To create a situation of "an old version of the agent is installed from the repository", you can downgrade the agent:

Debian: sudo apt-get install driveclient=<an old version> (Does not work unless you have the old version installed before. Use the usual way to get this situation (i.e., install a local package).

Redhat: sudo yum downgrade driveclient

-- end note]

Otherwise, if 5) is not true, then stop the agent daemon, upgrade the agent, and start the new agent daemon. The actual update may be delayed for some time if the updater is running as a daemon. See Usage for details.

ALL: If the logging level is set to verbose (already set in init script. See Other Options for details), the detailed steps will be logged (defaults to /var/log/cloudbackup-updater.log). System log (/var/log/messages) may also contains the information about how the agent daemon is stopped and started, but the info text various on different system.

Otherwise, the auto-updater waits for the agent to finish the current backup, restore, or cleanup task, stop the agent daemon, upgrade the agent, and start the new agent daemon.

ALL: The agent holds a lock file, /var/cache/driveclient/backup-running.lock, when performing these tasks, so do the auto-updater, when performing agent upgrade.

The auto-updater can be used in two ways:

1. As a command line tool. Execute cloudbackup-updater from the command line without the -d option, then driveclient is installed or updated to the latest version.
2. As a daemon. Execute cloudbackup-updater -d, then driveclient is installed or updated to the latest version. The auto-updater checks for the new agent version (as specified in release/windows/version.txt under the remote agent repository) every hour after it starts and keep the agent installed and updated. The interval of the checking can be changed. See Other Options.

Only one cloudbackup-updater can run at the same time. The attempt to start a second daemon will fail with an error.

The command line cloudbackup-updater can be safely used when the daemon is running. One of them will perform the actual agent upgrade. User can use the command line to update the agent immediately without waiting for the next checking.

When running as a daemon, after the auto-updater finds out that the latest agent is newer than the installed one, the update may be delayed. 50% of the users are expected to get the update within 6 hours, and 90% of the users are expected to get it within 11 hours. If the environment variable CLOUDBACKUP_UPDATER_DEBUG is set, the unit is minute rather than hour.

-r `URI`: The remote agent repository, defaults to http://agentrepo.drivesrvr.com. The local package management repositories are created according to this base URI. Can be set to an internal address for testing.

-v: Turn on verbose logging.

-h: Display help messages.

The following options only affect the daemon mode. They are simply ignored in command line mode.

-i `NUM`: The new version checking interval in minutes, defaults to 60 (an hour). If NUM is not an integer, fail with an error.

-l `PATH`: Path to the logging file. The file will be created if not exist, but the directory part of PATH shall exists.

-p `PATH`: Path to the pidfile, the traditional UNIX daemon lock file. The directory part of PATH shall exists.