Fun with FreeNAS

CrashPlan

CrashPlan [6] is a offsite cloud-based backup solution. It is one of the many FreeNAS plugins. Thanks to the FreeBSD jail system, you are able to run CrashPlan right on your FreeNAS box. FreeBSD jails allow you to isolate and compartmentalize your system. Built on the chroot concept, jails are essentially OS-level virtualization that allows you create a separate instance. Jails are isolated from the host as a virtual instance but share the same kernel. For the CrashPlan configuration here, you will be creating a jail in which it runs.

Getting CrashPlan installed and configured takes a few steps, but I will go through them in detail. First, on the FreeNAS server, go to Plugins , choose CrashPlan , and click Install to download and install the CrashPlan application to your FreeNAS box (Figure 8).

Figure 8: Installing the CrashPlan plugin.

To configure the plugin, go to Jails | View Jails , then select your crashplan listed under Jail and click the Shell icon at the bottom of the screen (Figure 9). Edit /etc/rc.conf to enable SSHD by changing the sshd_enable line to "YES":

sshd_enable="YES"

Next you need to create a new user who is a member of the wheel group via the console with Account | Users | Add User . Simply follow the questions and make sure to specify this user as a member of the wheel group.

Figure 9: Configuring your CrashPlan plugin.

Now that you have created a user, you should copy your public key (from the desktop) to the CrashPlan jail:

ssh-copy-id crashplan@<ipaddressofjail>

Finally, create a tunnel to the CrashPlan jail with this SSH command:

ssh -L 4200:127.0.0.1:4243 crashplan@<ipaddressofjail> -N -v -v

To be assured this is running, you can check with

netstat -na | grep LISTEN | grep 42

You should see the CrashPlan daemon running.

A CrashPlan Client on the Desktop

The CrashPlan configuration will be "headless" on FreeNAS, and the client will be on one of the desktops. On your desktop machine (mine is Linux), install the CrashPlan client:

tar zxvf CrashPlan_3_7_0_Linux.tgz

Change into the CrashPlan install directory and run the install script:

./sudo .install.sh

Once the script completes, edit your local CrashPlan configuration file ui.properties. The file is located in /usr/local/crashplan/conf/ui.properties. Uncomment and change your port to 4200.

Next go back to your FreeNAS box and visit Plugins | CrashPlan . Enable the CrashPlan plugin by moving the switch from the OFF position to ON.

Connecting to a Headless CrashPlan Jail

Now that the CrashPlan client is installed on your desktop and configured on the FreeNAS server, you can connect to it. First create a tunnel to the CrashPlan jail with the following SSH command:

ssh -L 4200:127.0.0.1:4243 crashplan@<ipaddressofjail> -N -v -v

Now change to the directory where the CrashPlan client is installed and start up the client CrashPlanDesktop.