Configuration backup failing

Hello! Since a couple of weeks, webmin configuration backup is failing, even though I did not touch the configuration. Here's the not very useful output:

Starting backup of 63 modules to /webmin.tar.gz on backup.######.net via FTP .. TAR failed : .. backup failed! See the error message above for the reason why.

What could the problem be? Virtualmin backups are running fine...

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

Hmm, we may need Jamie's help in what that error is saying exactly and some possible causes.

In the meantime -- if you log into your Virtualmin server, are you able to fire up a command line FTP program, and upload a file to your FTP server -- putting the file in the / directory there (just as the backup is attempting to)?

At first glance, it sounds like there's an issue with tarring up the files, but this is just to rule out an FTP issue just in case :-)

ftp is working fine, virtualmin is using the same ftp configuration to upload its files

Do you have access to the logs on the destination system? If so, it would be useful to see what is recorded in /var/log/messages and /var/log/auth.log ..

Unfortunately not, it's just a remote ftp backup server and I just got the account to upload my backups...

i tried to have it save it to a local file:

Starting backup of 63 modules to /root/backup/webmin.tar.gz ..
TAR failed : 
.. backup failed! See the error message above for the reason why.

so it's definetly not an ftp problem :(

OK .. so if you limit the backup to only a few modules, does it work?

Perhaps one module's backup is failing somehow.

what a great idea :) yeah, I deselected some modules I don't use/need (I selected them all due to lazyness) and suddenly it works again ;) thank you!

Cool, glad that worked.

By the way, webmin 1.510 will fix a bug that can cause this when certain broken modules are selected..

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.

just a note to say that (probably after upgrading virtualin to 3.77) the problem reappeared. i upgraded to webmin 1.510 but the problem remained. however, by deselecting the startup/shutdown module, the backup seems to work fine agian. odd...

Hal9000 - did you see this failure with the bootup / shutdown module on a debian system?

yes, i am running a 64 bit debian 5.0 system.

And is this error reliably re-producable? If you select just that module to backup, does it always fail?

And is this error reliably re-producable? If you select just that module to backup, does it always fail?

hmmm i played around a bit more, and it looks like backup works for up to 31 modules, as soon as i select any 32rd module it will fail.

That's wierd ... which browser are you using these, and does this happen when using a different one like Firefox?

i tried chrome4, ie8 and ff3.6 and all the same problem, "TAR error". really weird, but it's not that big issue... i will inform you if i can trace the problem down a little bit more...

Ok, I think I see it now .. you must be hitting a command line length limit in the tar command Webmin runs.

I'll fix this in the 1.520 Webmin release.

wicked :) oddly enough, it used to work with all modules selected in the past... probably prior to webmin 1.5 then.

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.