Ubuntu 18.04 Upgrade and Crashplan

If you’re like me and have a Drobo, you realize that you journey to back up your data isn’t complete when files make it to the device.  Oh no, it’s a lot more complicated than that …

When I bought the Drobo I was super excited to see that they’d listed a Crashplan app on the box.  Sadly, this was a complete falsehood.  I won’t go into details here other than to say that it was misleading.  Crashplan had no intention to provide native support the device  (and I don’t actually fault them for this – it’s work to support builds for different platforms).  There were tricks involved and it was, quite frankly, a nightmare.

But as a relentless computer nerd, I didn’t give up.

After talking to an absolutely awesome Support team member from Code 42 (Crashplan) I learned that I could actually use their Linux client, mount shares to my Drobo, and back up from there.  Perfect!  Essentially, make new directories (sudo mkdir /mnt/drobo/<your directory>), create fstab entries to mount the shares, and select them from the client.  Bam!  And it worked well for quite a while …

But enter Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (sigh).

To date, I’ve enjoyed Ubuntu.  It’s been my go-to distro for a lot of reasons, but upon update video wouldn’t work.  My screen quite literally strobed, and I felt almost like I’d have a seizure while trying to troubleshoot.  It took me many weeks of poking around, but eventually found the solution.  In brief, here’s what I had to do:

1 – Find New Drivers

I found this really great article explaining the steps for an AMD card.  In my case, I had an AMD Radeon 7700 Series card.  Nothing fancy, nothing new, but solid and dependable.  Yet not working.

The directions above were clear, although I tried this TWICE to no avail.  Again – because I really want my system to work and not have to rebuild – I tried again today (June 20th, 2018) and discovered new drivers.  This last time, using the file “amdgpu-pro-18.20-606296.tar.xz” worked.  Driver installed.  No seizure-inducing flashing.  Also, I was often not able to log in and would have to reboot, reboot again, etc.

Step one down …

2 – Fix Crashplan UI Crash

Once past the driver issue, I experienced another disappointment.  Upon clicking the Crashplan icon – which for the record worked before – it would never open.  Again, sighs …  I checked the logs:  /usr/local/crashplan/log/ui_error.log

Specifically, the error read:  “error while loading shared libraries: libgconf-2.so.4: cannot open shared object file”

Fortunately the error is one that others had addressed before. In 18.02 beta, there’s a missing library called “libconf-2.so.4” (referenced above).

Solution:  sudo apt -y install libgconf2-4

Once this library was installed, I clicked Crashplan and it worked perfectly.

Thank you Interwebs for the answers.  I see a nice “Backup Complete”.