Server Installation

System requirements

We recommend using high quality server hardware when running Minarca in production, mainly for storage.

Minimum server requirement for evaluation

These minimum requirements are solely for evaluation and shall not be used in a production environment :

  • Cpu 64bit x86-64 or amd64, 2 core

  • Memory : 2 GiB RAM

  • Hard drive/storage more than 8 GiB

Compatibility Matrix

Here’s a compatibility matrix for Minarca Server and Minarca Agent:

Agent

v5.x

v4.5 - v4.3

v4.2 - v4.0

v3.x

Minarca Server v5.*

✓

✓

✓ (1)

✓ (1)

Minarca Server v4.5 - v4.3

✓

✓ (1)

✓ (1)

Minarca Server v4.2 - v4.0

✓ (1)

✓ (1)

✓ (1)

Minarca Server v3.*

✓

  1. Supported if the agent is already configured.

Installation Steps

On a Debian Linux server:

apt update
apt upgrade
apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl lsb-release gpg
curl -L https://www.ikus-soft.com/archive/minarca/public.key | gpg --dearmor > /usr/share/keyrings/minarca-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/minarca-keyring.gpg] https://nexus.ikus-soft.com/repository/apt-release-$(lsb_release -sc)/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/minarca.list
apt update
apt install minarca-server

The server should be running on http://127.0.0.1:8080 listening on all interfaces. For a production deployment, it is strongly recommended to configure a reverse proxy with SSL termination like Nginx or Apache.

You may stop or start the service using systemd:

sudo service minarca-server stop
sudo service minarca-server start

Once installed, continue reading about how to configure minarca-server.

You may access the web interface at http://127.0.0.1:8080 using:

* username: admin
* password: admin123

Configure Storage

As an additional steps to the installation, you may want to change the location used to store the backups. By default, this location is /backups/ and may be changed to an alternate location.

Read how to configure Minarca storage

Setup SSH Server

On a fresh Debian installation, Minarca is working fine with the default SSH server configuration (etc/ssh/sshd_config), but if you have enforce some configuration in your SSH server, you may need to update its configuration to allow “minarca” user to authenticate.

Something similar to the following should make it work in most environment:

Match User minarca
        PubkeyAuthentication yes
        PasswordAuthentication no
        AllowGroups minarca
        X11Forwarding no
        AllowTcpForwarding no
        PermitTTY no

Minarca with Docker or LXC

When installing Minarca into a dedicated server or a virtual machine, the process is seamless. If you are installing Minarca in a container like Docker or LXC, you must pay attention to configure the container properly.

Minarca-Shell, the component responsible to handle SSH connection and isolate each user’s connection, is using a Kernel feature called user namespaces. This feature is used by Minarca-Shell to create a chroot jail to completely isolate each user SSH connection. That same feature is used by many applications for improved hardening. Without this feature, Minarca-Shell will refuse any incoming SSH connection and throw errors.

When installing Minarca on a dedicated server or a virtual machine, the installation process take care of enabling this feature if not already enabled. When installing Minarca in a container, it’s not enough because this feature might be disabled by your container orchestration like Docker or LXC.

For Docker

The container needs to be started with privileged:

docker run -privileged

For LXC

The container need to be started with security.nesting:

lxc launch ubuntu nestc1 -c security.nesting=true

For Proxmox VE (lxc)

The container must be configured with feature nesting=1.

Edit /etc/pve/lxc/100.conf by adding:

features: nesting=1

Migrating from Rdiffweb to Minarca

If you already have an installation of Rdiffweb, you may migrate relatively easily to Minarca. To migrate from Rdiffweb to Minarca, you must first uninstall Rdiffweb.

1. Uninstall Rdiffweb

sudo service rdiffweb stop
sudo pip remove rdiffweb

2. Migrate Rdiffweb user database

Rdiffweb saves the user database in /etc/rdiffweb while Minarca saves the data to /etc/minarca. If you want to keep your users preferences, you must copy the database to Minarca folder.

cp /etc/rdiffweb/rdw.db /etc/minarca/rdw.db

4. Install Minarca server

Proceed with the installation of Minarca.

wget https://www.ikus-soft.com/archive/minarca/minarca-server_latest_amd64.deb
apt install minarca-server_latest_amd64.deb

5. Review Minarca configuration

When installing Minarca, a new configuration file gets created in /etc/minarca/minarca-server.conf. You should review the configuration file according to your previous Rdiffweb configuration.

Make sure to set MinarcaRestrictedToBasedDir to false if your user’s home directories are not located under a single directory.

Restart the service when you are done reviewing the configuration.

sudo service minarca-server restart

6. Change permissions

Minarca web server is not running as root and required the data to be readable and writable by minarca user. If your backups are all located under /backups/ as it was recommended by Rdiffweb documentation, you may run the following command to update the permissions.

sudo chown -R minarca:minarca /backups/