Azure-Pfsense backup agent not working

jacoventer

Hello

I deployed a Pfsense directly from available images from Azure :

Offer: netgate-pfsense-plus-fw-vpn-route
Plan: netgate-pfsense-plus

Straight out of the box the agent for backup does not work, Azure support does not provide support for the issue.

Is anyone else experiencing this issue and found a solution?

Kind Regards,

stephenw10

Can you clarify? Do you mean the Auto Config Backup in pfSense?

This maybe?: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-azure-about-mars
Unlikely since that looks to be Windows only.

Steve

stephenw10

Ah, do you in fact mean this?: https://github.com/Azure/WALinuxAgent/issues/1335

Officially the agent doesn't support any BSD version for that but can be made to work as shown there.

jacoventer

Hi @stephenw10 , just FYI (over a year later), the GitHub link you posted did work and I have been performing backups for the whole time since this post (although, for some reason, it does take 3 hours to perform a backup).

The Pfsense image from last year is Version 22.05 and I am unable to do the upgrade in place, after the upgrade to 23.01 the router cannot boot up, it seems like the problem is boot sector-related, if this can be fixed somehow the rest of the post does not matter.

I figured I could use the new image on Azure and just import the backup, the current Pfsense version image on Azure is 23.05.1, but it still suffers from no baked-in Linux agent for Azure, do you know if the fix above would still work for the new image, from what I can see in the /usr/local/bin , the Python version is now 3.9/11, so I assume the commands wont work anymore:

Does NETGATE plan to bake the feature workaround from GitHub into new images at some point as it is a critical part of any environment to be able to backup a VM in Azure?

stephenw10

There is no plan to add that as a built in feature as far as I know.

I haven't tested it but I would expect links to Python 3.9 to work there where 3.8 did previously. Did you try that?

jacoventer

Hi Stephen

Thanks for the reply, I have found an updated guide, but it is still not aimed at Pfsense +. ( https://www.error.ch/pfsense-on-azure/)

I am currently stuck just trying to install the agent, I have linked 3.9 with:
ln -s /usr/local/bin/python3.9 /usr/bin/python

The "python setup.py install" command returns "python: Command not found."

Typing "python" and press Tab reveals:

I have also tried to link 3.11 with the same results.

Any ideas?

stephenw10

You don't need to install waagent, it's already installed and running in Plus.

jacoventer

:D aah lol, thanks.

So I assume I just continue with the rest of the Symlinks, with the two versions of Python, do I use 3.9 or 3.11?

stephenw10

Testing it now. So far I'm not seeing any errors without adding any symlinks. The backup looks to be running. But Azure reports very little so......

stephenw10

Ok. I was able to successfully take a backup after running only:

[23.05.1-RELEASE][admin@azure53.stevew.lan]/root: ln -s /usr/local/bin/python3.9 /usr/bin/python
[23.05.1-RELEASE][admin@azure53.stevew.lan]/root: ln -s /usr/local/sbin/waagent /usr/sbin/waagent

However I will note that the logs are full of python errors. It threw errors for me last time though so I'm not sure anything has changed there.

stephenw10

Additionally I added:

[23.05.1-RELEASE][admin@azure53.stevew.lan]/root: ln -s /usr/bin/base64 /usr/local/bin/base64

That doesn't appear to be required but it does remove a large number of errors from the waagent logs so I assume it's doing something!

I tested restoring from the backups and it was successful.

Steve