cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

RALUS for Linux: any hope for Kernel 3.x support?

Artegic
Level 6

Hi all,

as stated repeatedly here and elsewhere, RALUS does not work as-is on Linux systems running kernel 3.0 or later.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH201095, last updated 2012-12-21, notes that RALUS crashes on Linux kernel 3.x but only proposes an invalid solution (installing a kernel patch which is already merged in these kernel releases) and proceeds to state that "at the time of writing", kernel 3.x is not officially supported. Indeed, in the SCL http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH175581 support for every distribution stops before the switch to kernel 3, with the notable exception of SLES 11 SP2. (I wonder ...)

As described on http://blog.redweb.at/2012/08/howto-backupexec-2012-linux-agent-and-kernel-3-0-debian/, the cause of the problem is rather trivial: RALUS calls the non-existing (since kernel 2.2.x) ioctl() function SIOCGIFCOUNT. On systems running kernel 2.6 this only results in a syslog error message while the agent itself recovers by evaluating the returned error code and depending on that, using a fallback value. But with kernel 3, the returned error code has changed to conform to the documentation, causing RALUS to throw an exception. The correct fix would of course be equally trivial: drop the invalid ioctl call and directly use the fallback value which apparently works fine as it is already always used on kernel 2.6, anyway.

Of course, Symantec support doesn't want to hear about this problem precisely because kernel 3.x isn't officially supported.

Any chance of seeing that fix incorporated in RALUS in the not-too-far future so we can stop manually patching the binary file /opt/VRTSralus/bin/libbesocket.so with all the related dangers?

Thanks,
Tilman

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

My guess is that you would probably need to wait until the next release BE 2012 R2 if it is going to be supported.  This is my guess as Symantec does not publish any support roadmap.  R2 is due to be released in the middle of the year.

View solution in original post

3 REPLIES 3

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

My guess is that you would probably need to wait until the next release BE 2012 R2 if it is going to be supported.  This is my guess as Symantec does not publish any support roadmap.  R2 is due to be released in the middle of the year.

Javed_Nawaz
Level 3
Employee Accredited Certified
Kindly check the following Symantec knowledgebase for Linux Kernel 3.X http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH201095 Remote Agent for Linux (RALUS) crashes immediately after starting when Linux server has kernel version 3.x.

Artegic
Level 6

@Javed: What should I check it for? To this very day it still says "Updated: 2012-12-21".