Bug#745984: linux: CrashPlan (proprietary backup software) malfunctions when "uname -r" does not contain a 3-part version number

["Nathaniel J. Smith" <njs@pobox.com>]

Source: linux
Severity: normal

CrashPlan is a backup product:
   http://crashplan.com
They're unusual in this space in that their "cloud" backup hosting service is a
bazillion times cheaper than everyone else's, and they have full Linux support.
The downside is that you have to use their proprietary backup software (though,
to be fair, it is substantially more featureful than any FOSS equivalent).

However, it apparently also contains a truly terrible bit of code which
attempts to figure out whether the kernel supports inotify by looking at the
kernel version number, and if the kernel version number does not contain 2
dots, then it assumes inotify is *not* available, and disables live filesystem
watching. The effect in practice is that backups are pretty much silently
disabled, so it's seriously dire. And unfortunately, on Debian:

~$ uname -r
3.13-1-amd64

Quoting a response from their customer support:

---------

Thank you for contacting Code42 support. Yes, this is a known issue, usually
affecting pre-release Debian users. Here is the notes from Engineering on the
issue:

Our validation of the kernel version is looking for two separating periods and
the realtime file watcher fails to run if this is not found:

    From InotifyManager.java, lines 164-170:
    /* Kernel versions always have three distinct digits */
    String[] versions = m.group(1).split("\.");
    if (versions.length < 3) {
        log.info("Inadequate kernel version information: " + m.group());
        return false;
    }

We don't have a fix/patch yet, but it looks like it is in the queue to be
looked at, and hopefully a resolution will be pushed out soon. Let me know if I
can answer anything else. Thanks!

----------

I'm not sure if Debian should do anything about this, given that it's clearly a
bug in a piece of proprietary software, not in Debian itself. But it is the
case that Debian's handling of the Linux release field is causing real-world
interoperability problems with software that works on (AFAIK) all non-Debian
Linux systems. And if nothing else it's probably helpful for this information
to be recorded somewhere public.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.13-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash