Good morning, Myles.

I have a few thoughts that might contribute to recovering from this
situation.

1. Sounds like the element.io installer hosed up your nginx web server
files (which bacularis relies upon). Please note that because bacularis
isn't integral to the function of bacula itself, the bacula installation
could be just fine. If this is the extent of the damage, and the cloud
server is otherwise stable, why not get a shell on it and do a restore from
the command line bacula bconsole utility? Could be much less invasive than
a full system restore using a (comparatively) untested restore plan. I
would REALLY try this first. I would restore the files to a different
location than the destination, to give yourself the ability to compare with
diff or something prior to restoration. You'll probably want to bring the
relevant system services down prior to restoration of files. so bring down
nginx, bacularis, etc.

1a. If bacularis is the only thing that is broken, maybe get a temporary
bacularis instance running to assist with this process? Probably more
complicated and troublesome that just doing a restore using bconsole,
though.

2. If the above isn't a viable option for some reason, I would suggest a
minor alternative to a custom recovery ISO. I don't know much about
crafting custom recovery ISO images so I'll suggest:
2a. Export your bacula configuration files (including any relevant certs)
from your existing system. At minimum you'll want the contents of
/opt/bacula/etc. I suggest copying the entire /opt/bacula directory and all
subdirectories. Probably best to use tar to export it since that way you're
guaranteed to be able to save user:group permissions and ownership. Chatgpt
can help you with this.
2b. Export your latest catalog backup. This would require that you have
functional bconsole access (assuming bacularis is unusable). If you have
the ability to do this, I don't know why you wouldn't do a full recovery of
your system from bconsole instead. Perhaps you have a reason. Either way,
restore your most recent full catalog backup. If you don't have a recent
catalog backup, take one from within bconsole, then export it. Will be a
bacula.sql file that contains all the database commands to fully drop a
previous bacula database instance and then restore your entire bacula
database.
2c. Bacula depends on Fully Qualified Domain Names (hostname.domain) in the
bacula configuration files. If you want this ISO to (temporarily) fully
take the place of your damaged bacula system you'll probably need to change
your booted ISO system's hostname to match the hostname of your damaged
system. Please be very careful when doing this (esp during testing) because
you don't want a hostname conflict. ALTERNATIVELY, consider just a
different name for your recovery system and edit the bacula configuration
files to match this name. The inclusion of your custom cert could
complicate this if it's tied in some way to the FQDN of the damaged server.
2d. Instead of trying to build a fully functional bacula installation into
a custom recovery ISO, maybe script first time installation and
configuration of bacula. Will need to set up your repo file, install
bacula, drop your old configuration files over top of the default bacula
configuration, edit configuration files to match any changed details like
different system hostname, restore bacula database backup, install
bacularis, (maybe install bacularis sooner in the process?), then look into
restoring your needed files.

Issues with the above, possible alternatives:
If you can't get a database recovery, but you can get bacula set up on
another system and give it access to your catalog backup volumes, you could
use the bscan utility to scan the relevant catalog backup volumes and
rebuild bacula's awareness of what files are available. could then do a
restore of the catalog backup, and export backup to your bacula recovery
system. The possible need to bscan a volume to enable catalog recovery is
one reason why I always make sure that my catalog backups go into their own
dedicated volumes - faster / easier bscan in the event such is needed, no
need to also scan through tons of data that include various system files.
You might consider setting up an alternative bacula system in a VM,
configure, get full access to your bacula backups, then restore the
necessary backup to storage that could be accessible to the troubled system
once that system is booted into a recovery environment. This way you
wouldn't need to set up bacula in the recovery environment, just copy the
files over into the system.
If the existing bacula instance is accessible via bconsole, I'd just
restore the backup from there. Be sure to export a copy of your bacula
catalog from your backups too. Also, be certain that the catalog backup you
exported is up to date and contains the latest backup.
If you cannot export the latest catalog backup, or the latest catalog
backup doesn't include the most recent full system backup, AND bconsole
isn't accessible / functional, then I guess you could set up bacula in a
test system, then bscan the volumes related to the most recent full system
backup.


Robert Gerber
402-237-8692
r...@craeon.net

On Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 8:41 AM MylesDearBusiness via Bacula-users <
bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> I`d be pleased to provide more detail, I was trying to keep my answer
> terse, obviously I undershot !?
>
> I commissioned our cloud server, installing our business services and then
> securing with community edition Bacula system backup to an offsite Koofr
> storage backend, via rclone.  I also installed and configured Bacularis
> with appropriate Nginx reverse-proxying and production SSL cert install.
>
> I then attempted to install element.io (as a potential Slack replacement
> for our company) and all he** broke loose, the microk8s installer
> completely decimated my NGINX configuration and all services stopped
> working.  The element.io "support" team declined to help me recover my
> system from an installer that crashed halfway through, leaving the system
> in an unstable state.
>
> Thus, I wish to restore the entire bare metal cloud server from a complete
> Bacula backup I took just prior to doing this test install.
>
> After trying and failing to use more low-level manual means, I`m now
> pivoting and trying to adapt an existing Live Ubuntu ISO and install
> appropriate Bacula packages and storage backend linkages using CUBIC.   I
> plan to test the ISO on local VirtualBox and ultimately bring it up in a
> virtual CDROM on my cloud server`s ASMB9-iKV.  I then want the ISO to come
> up with all Bacula services primed and ready for a full system restore.
>
> I`m not sure what the history was that led up to the removal of the Live
> ISO from the community Bacula builds, but it`s taking a LOT of my time to
> figure out how to do restores on an unstable system.  Is there a reason a
> basic universal Bacula recovery ISO isn't being built with each community
> release ?
>
> Thanks,
>
> <Myles>
> On 2024-06-25 2:55 a.m., Davide F. wrote:
>
> Hi Myles,
>
> Could you give the context ?
>
> I do t understand what’s the problem you are trying to solve, why do you
> want to build an ISO ?
>
> Best,
>
> Davide
>
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2024 at 03:25 MylesDearBusiness via Bacula-users <
> bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>
>> I spent most of today trying to create a custom ISO manually, with no
>> success.  I'm trying to boot locally in my VirtualBox before the main event
>> in which I'll remotely mount it into my cloud server's IPMI ASMB9-iKVM and
>> boot it using a virtual CDROM drive.
>>
>> I'm aiming to try CUBIC next to customize a stock live boot ISO.
>>
>> For me, with my level of knowledge, and only ChatGPT as my support
>> resource, this may take many days or even weeks to achieve.
>>
>> Does anybody have an ISO that I could use as a starting point?
>>
>> I was hoping to have Bacula community edition 13.0.3 or 13.0.4 on this
>> recovery ISO.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> <Myles>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bacula-users mailing list
>> Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net
>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
>>
> --
>
>
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