Ubuntu – Killing X-related processes when CrashPlan is running

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I am currently running Ubuntu Server 12.04, but this applies to all flavours of Linux really.

This server does a bunch of things and is controlled remotely via ssh. Some time ago I have installed XFCE for those times when I didn't really feel like commandlining or to speed up some program configuration. It's off most of the time and I only launch it when I need it.

Today I installed CrashPlan to have my other computers on the network backup to the server. For those of you who don't know it, CrashPlan comes with two services, one is the actual backup engine and one is the GUI. So I installed in on the server, launched the GUI to configure it and then killed X (sudo service lightdm stop).

But now every time I try to login remotely with RDP from my Windows machine (xdrp is installed on the server) I am able to connect graphically to the server, which means that all the X-related processes are still running.

What have I forgotten? Is it possible to stop running the CrashPlan GUI service and have it never start anymore?

Best Answer

What makes you think X-related processes are still running? When you log in remotely xrdp (re-)connects you to your GUI environment. If you don't have one running already then xrdp-sesman will cause a GUI environment to get initialized. (If you want to prevent that you could sudo service xrdp stop although it will likely come back on re-boot unless you prevent that.)

Why not just ssh into the Ubuntu server and do a ps -ef to assure yourself that no processes are running that you do not expect? In the case of CrashPlan you would see CrashPlanService all the time but you only see CrashPlanDesktop if the GUI is running.

Related Solutions

Linux – How to backup a running system

Not so much a solution as a few nuggets of advice which may be helpful to consider if using tar/cpio/rsync etc. First, it might be a good idea to backup from a bind mount of your source filesystem (mount --bind source mntdir). This will have a similar effect as the --one-file-system options to rsync and tar and -xdev with find. It has the advantages of working if these options are unavailable (perhaps due to an old version, although note that bind mounts were introduced in Linux 2.4) and allowing files underneath mount points to be backed up, which may be desirable in some cases.

Second, I would advise to use numeric uids and gids where possible (--numeric-owner for tar, --numeric-ids for rsync and --numeric-uid-gid for cpio). If you restore a backup without this and an owner/group no longer exists or the uid/gid is different (this may happen particularly if a live disc is used to restore the backup), you can have one set of uids/gids used when restoring which become invalid after /etc/passwd and /etc/group are restored.

Also, take a look at clonezilla. The methods that they use to do the bulk of the backup may not be of use to you, but when it runs has options to backup boot sectors/partition tables and supports both MBR and GPT, so there may be some scripts there which can be copied/adapted to your purposes.

As a final 2 cents, I would consider rsync to be the standard way to do this. It is surely the most efficient method when doing incremental backups, although not so much for a one off full backup. Sure, it is not ubiquitous, but I think it is a mistake not to include it in the server edition of a distro. It may well already be installed on all of your servers.

Prevent backup from running in parallel

There are different ways of doing this, but IMO the easiest is inserting flock before the command in the crontab file:

5  *  *  *  *   root  flock -n /var/lock/backup /usr/local/bin/backup

The /var/lock/backup file is the lock that flock uses and -n immediately makes the command fail if the lock already exists.

This could of course mean that if one backup takes 1 hour and 1 minute, that the next one starts 59 minutes later. If that is a problem you could look into using -x.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – How to backup a running system

Prevent backup from running in parallel

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