Monthly Archives: August 2011

Crashplan Install Script for ARM Debian on Pogoplugs and Dockstars

I’ve pulled together information from a few sources on installing Crashplan backup software on a Cloud Engines Pogoplug, or Seagate Dockstar, and turned it into a simple bash script.

The script assumes you’ve already installed and booted Debian on your device using the instructions and scripts provided by Jeff Doozan. Be sure to check his forum for updates.

My main contribution here is in pulling things together into a bash script. I’ve built on the work of others, in particular Crashplan user Torbjörn and Paul Chilton.

Get the script here.

Update:

  • The script now references a local mirror of the jtux source tarball, and the patchfile.
  • Script references an out of date version of Crashplan. You can probably just update the URL, but I haven’t tested it. On the other hand, Crashplan autoupdates for you.
  • More recent versions of Crashplan have a new native MD5 library dependency.  They complain about it in engine_error.log, but automatically fall back to a marginally slower java version of the routine instead.
  • The version of the openjdk6 package in Debian Squeeze has bugs in the JVM JIT. In my experience, this led to the Crashplan service dying occasionally, historically, and often now that I’ve got more files. The alternatives are to edit the java command-line options in /usr/local/crashplan/bin/run.conf to make it run in interpreted mode only (-Xint) or to download a copy of the Oracle Embedded JRE SE (ejre) for ARM v5 headless and update the crashplan scripts to use it.
  • I may update the script to deal with these issues once I have something to test the changes against, but I have too many other, higher priority, projects right now.