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Managing Crashplan on a Headless Server
Sep 18, 2015
One minute read

2018-01-02 update: With Crashplan version 6.6.0, remotely connecting to the Crashplan daemon running on a headless linux server stopped working. While it was never officially supported, it wasn’t outright broken until this update.

One (or the?) workaround is to use X11 forwarding to run the GUI application on the headless server and interact with the interface on a machine with an X server.

The GUI application is called CrashPlanDesktop. In order to run it, you’ll likely need to install some dependencies. Most – but not all – of them can be taken care of by installing xterm (a terminal emulator for the X window system).

sudo apt install xterm

At this point, running CrashPlanDesktop likely still won’t work. Any remaining dependencies should be able to be addressed by iteratively attempting to run CrashPlanDesktop from the command line, if nothing happens checking the UI error log located in /usr/local/crashplan/log/ui_error.log, searching for the error to identify the dependency, then trying again until it works.

One of the main dependencies of CrashPlanDesktop that wasn’t pulled in by xterm was libxss1, but there may be others.

References


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