kernel module installer failed. (0) – R1Soft – Could not find a suitable hcpdriver module for your system – How to install CDP Agent Kernel Module in Ubuntu

There are times, you may end up with the following error, when you are trying to install R1Soft hcp module or the kernel module in Ubuntu based servers:

kernel module installer failed. (0) - R1Soft - Could not find a suitable hcpdriver module for your system - Ubuntu

Full error could be like the following when you call for –get-module

root@hisab:/lib/modules/r1soft# serverbackup-setup --get-module
Building header archive ...
outfile = /tmp/headers881407773
headers = /usr/src/linux-headers-5.4.0-128-generic
Session ID: 379634599
Waiting to upload...
Uploading file...
Waiting in build queue...
Failed to get suitable module for this system: Failed to build module: No builders found.

Get module failed.
Falling back to old get-module ...
Checking if module needs updated
Checking for binary module
Waiting                       /
No binary module found
Gathering kernel information
Gathering kernel information complete.
Creating kernel headers package
Checking '/tmp/r1soft-cki.1667140819' for kernel headers
Found headers in '/tmp/r1soft-cki.1667140819'
Compressing...
Starting module build...
Building                      /          kernel module installer failed. (0):
Internal error encountered. Please contact support
Request ID: (75ca382d-5a0e-4161-8c70-8b136a6b1330)
http://www.r1soft.com/distros/index.php?uuid=75ca382d-5a0e-4161-8c70-8b136a6b1330

To solve this error, you may get the built kernel module for Ubuntu based on it’s distribution in their repository. The link to the repository would be as following:

http://beta.r1soft.com/modules/

Now, if you are using Ubuntu 20.04, then the module would be available under the folder: Ubuntu_2004_x64

In my case, it was Ubuntu 20.04. Next stop, is to find the kernel version. You may get it from the following command:

root@hisab:~# uname -a
Linux hisab.skincafe.co 5.4.0-128-generic #144-Ubuntu SMP Tue Sep 20 11:00:04 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
root@hisab:~#

Kernel number to note in our case, would be ‘5.4.0-128’. Now search for this inside the link:

http://beta.r1soft.com/modules/Ubuntu_2004_x64/

You should find a match, like for my case it was the following link:

http://beta.r1soft.com/modules/Ubuntu_2004_x64/hcpdriver-cki-5.4.0-128-generic.209.ko

Next stop, is to go to the r1soft module folder and load the module. You may do so like the following:

cd /lib/modules/r1soft
wget http://beta.r1soft.com/modules/Ubuntu_2004_x64/hcpdriver-cki-5.4.0-128-generic.209.ko

Now, all you need, is to restart r1soft. Remember to stop and star the agent instead of direct restart.

service cdp-agent stop
service cdp-agent start

This should be able to load the HCP module now. You may verify this by typing:

root@hisab:~# hcp --list
Idera Hot Copy     6.16.4 build 117 (http://www.r1soft.com)
Documentation      http://wiki.r1soft.com
Forums             http://forum.r1soft.com

Thank you for using Hot Copy!
Idera makes the only Continuous Data Protection software for Linux.


No Hot Copy sessions are currently running.
root@hisab:~#

Happy troubleshooting

How to: Setup a server for R1Soft CDP backup?

We at Mellowhost has been utilizing R1Soft CDP backup for last 8 years. R1Soft has been a great backup tool even though the tool is immensely resource hoggy. At different times we had gone through different situations to handle our backup servers efficiently. After all the hiccups with backup nodes, we ended up efficiently configuring 3 backup servers of 3 different configuration

  1. backup1 = It contains 12TB file system on a RAID 0 array. It copies data to a BTRFS compressed drive once a week to keep the data safe if RAID 0 dies. This server uses RAID 0 for faster drive verification and block scanning by r1soft. This server hosts servers that requires frequent backing up and can sustain a loss of a week data (Less important data). As the server performs really fast due to being RAID 0, we can run multiple r1soft threads at a time including disk safe verification and block scans.
  2. backup2 = It contains 30TB file system in RAID 6 hardware array. This is used for hosting our VPS backups. This server is a seriously large one to keep backups of our enterprise VPS clients.
  3. backup3 = It contains 16TB file system in RAID 10 hardware array. This server is hosted in a East Coast American Location. It is our off network backup server and keeps backups for East Coast servers too.

One of the key factor in designing a backup server is the size and the location. Need to keep in mind that CDP 3 takes more space than CDP 2 for unknown reason while still being a differential backup solution, not just an incremental. Location of the server matters due to the network speed. If you are hosting your server a lot far than the server network, it may take longer time to complete the initial storage. Due to the latency it may fails to perform as fast like 1Gbps even if both network supports it. Just for an example, if you are backing up your data at 1MBps speed, it would take 12.13 days to complete backup of 1TB data [ Calculation: (((1024 x 1024) / 60) / 60) / 24 = 12.13 days ]. A 100Mbps port can give you speed upto 10MBps, while you can have 50MBps+ speed if you are using a 1Gbps network roughly. So why does the speed matter? If you are backing up your initial data in 13 days, that doesn’t mean it will be the same all the time. Your second backup would take much less amount of time as it only needs to upload the differential backups. That is true! But the problem will come when you require to do a bare metal restore. If your server requires a disaster recovery, you would then need 13 days to restore your server to the original state. Your customers won’t sit down for 13 days! While creating backup, it is important to think about disaster recovery too. How fast are you going to be able to restore the backup is an important concern while designing your disaster recovery solution.

I always recommend users to choose a 1Gbps network with a latency below 2ms if you want to have a good disaster recovery solution. This can guarantee a faster bare metal restore when needed.

The second key factor while creating the R1soft backup server would be to choose the RAID. If you are thinking to create r1soft backup on a non-raided solution, I think you should drop off your idea. RAID isn’t necessarily always use to keep your data safe, it can also be used for performance. Keeping a RAID 0 or striping in general is must for a R1Soft server. Otherwise, every couple of times, you are going to see a lot of stalled processes doing ‘disk safe verification’ ‘block scan’ etc etc and not able to keep the backup up to date or canceling processes due to duplicate backup process (Old one taking too long to complete). It is better not to choose RAID 5. I particularly didn’t try RAID 5, but I have used RAID – Z on ZFS file system, which was seriously slow for my work around. I switched the server later on to RAID 0 and BTRFS compression to keep a weekly backup which tremendously improved the R1Soft performance. We at later time, worked to create more backup servers with hardware RAID WB cache and battery backed unit to give us more performance benefit while creating and restoring backups. These servers have been performing tremendously well with R1Soft. They can also be called good disaster recovery node.

Last, I recommend you to understand that backup isn’t just keeping a copy of your data of your online existence. It is important to design a disaster recovery solution instead of just creating backups. If you are simply into creating backups, you probably don’t need R1Soft or any high end servers instead simple Rsync would work fine. But to create ‘Disaster Recovery’ solution, you need high level planning, good hardwares and good cost estimation. If you are leaving behind in any, you will probably fail to create a good disaster recovery solution that actually ‘works’.

Backing up LVM Cache Volume?

I have been trying to explore what options do we have to use SSD Cache with a HDD driven servers to create faster writes. There are both software and hardware solutions. Hardware solution comes to CacheCade which isn’t really costly at all (roughly costs 250$ extra per license), though I was interested to explore all the software solution that are currently available in the market.

There are bcache, flashcache & lvm cache, that are mostly used in production servers. I firstly discarded bcache because it requires you to format the disk with bcache, that triggers the less flexibility check for a module. I tried flashcache before, and don’t want to go with it in a production server any longer as the module is discontinued (It still works, don’t get me wrong). All it seems, lvm cache is the only one which is stable and going to improve over days.

LVM Cache does work great. With the smq lvm cache policy, writeback cachemode & deadline scheduler, you can reach 220MBps write speed with Intel SSD in RAID 1, which is normally available in a RAID 1 Intel SSD. You can double the speed by putting a RAID 10 SSD array to back the cache. Although, after all the test was done, I realized that lvm cache doesn’t support snapshot unfortunately. At least not yet, at the time I am writing the blog. Without the snapshot facility, the performance benchmark actually goes in vain.

Snapshots of cache type volume vg0/newvz is not supported.

Hardware solutions are always useful as the backend setup goes transparent to the OS, which allows us to use our own tool without worrying about the caching setup. Cachecade is probably the only available solution right now with all facilities for SSD cache in production servers.

How to Download a Backup of Gmail?

What is Gmail?

Gmail is a free (gratis), advertising-supported email service provided by Google. Users may access Gmail as secure webmail,[6] as well as via POP3 or IMAP4 protocols.

How to Download/Take Backup of Full Gmail Account?

Google has started a service called “Takeout”. It allows you to backup any Google Products you are using. Google allows you to take a MBOX copy of your Gmail archive. You would need to generate it from “https://www.google.com/settings/takeout/”.

Once the generation is done, you can download the backup and load it in any MBOX environment.

How much data does Mellowhost have in their Backup?

It should be pretty known if you are a Mellowhost customer that we backup our servers on daily basis. We are currently using R1Soft CDP for each of our servers. All the backup servers are offsite, that means they are not hosted in the same server you are using with Mellowhost and not even in Softlayer network. Continue reading “How much data does Mellowhost have in their Backup?”

48 restless hours!

RAID is not a backup solution, it is proved again! I was planning to write my experience of 48 hours from July 22 7:17 to July 24 7:23 GMT -5, couldn’t really manage to get some time. All the users who were in the Hemonto server should be aware about the recent issue we faced with our RAID. This post is just to elaborate how did we handle the situation.

Continue reading “48 restless hours!”