Folks,
1st backup went more or less fine - backup technically failed due to a few file / folder permissions not being accessible to root, but out of 430+ GB of data, 429 and change backed up without issue from the Ubuntu 9.10 samba shares.
The second backup did not go as well, however as the ralus agent service stopped for some reason on the Ubuntu box and subsequently BE was not able to connect. So, I figured it was time to try updating the agent, which unfortunately you can't do using the bulk updater, so here goes:
Found 6 RALUS patches for x86, rest of patches in the results are for x64 distros or Service Packs that apply to the BE server (my BE 12.5 server is running on Windows Server 2003 R2 x86, fully updated) (
http://www.symantec.com/business/support/downloads.jsp?pid=15047 - change version to 12.5, Platform to Linux):
312844
326004
327966
328485
Fix for 328485
336087
I installed each of these patches in chronogical order (as above). However, the install script for each is meant for Red Hat's rpm command, which does not exist in Debian-based distros, so in each of the above patches, which includes a installraluspatch.sh installer script, you have to change a line of code from the rpm command to the equivalent in Debian:
RALUSINSTALLED=`rpm -q -a | grep VRTSralus | wc -l`
can be replaced by
RALUSINSTALLED=`dpkg-query -s VRTSralus`
This allows the script to execute properly. There may be a slicker way to do this in the end, but it worked for me. I confirm that BE can still see the Ubuntu shares and I can still access the selection lists properly. Will report back results after next few backups to see if the service-cancelling issue is cleared up.