Installation

The Bacula File Daemon and the Microsoft 365 Plugin need to be installed on the host that is going to connect to the cloud based services. The plugin is implemented over a Java layer, therefore it can be deployed on the platform better suited for your needs among any of the officially supported platforms of Bacula Enterprise (RHEL, SLES, Debian, Ubuntu, Windows, etc).

Please, note that you may want to deploy your File Daemon and the plugin on a virtual machine directly deployed in Azure Cloud in order to reduce the latency between it and the Microsoft Graph API and experience modest performance gains. However, this option is only recommended in case of having a very stable connection between the File Daemon and the Storage Daemon, which means a special, dedicated connection with Azure or when the Storage Daemon is deployed in the cloud as well. This is not usually the case - thus the data needs to traverse the Internet with standard and shared connections from the File Daemon to the Storage Daemon. Disconnections while transmitting data between these two daemons may make jobs fail and cause large timeouts that are difficult to manage and stabilize. The best strategy strategy for this kind of scenarios is to deploy the File Daemon and the Plugin to the same host as the destination Storage Daemon is installed. This way, disconnections between the two daemons will not happen, while disconnections between the FD and M365 will be transparently recovered (when possible), so jobs will finish successfully.

The system must have Java >= 8 installed (openjdk-8-jre for example) and the Java executable should be available in the system PATH.

The Sharepoint module depends on the Powershell and the PnP Powershell modules. Therefore, they also need to be installed before installing the Bacula packages (see section PnP.Powershell below).

PnP.Powershell

Install PowerShell

In order to install PowerShell it is necessary to follow the instructions for the particular OS involved which may be found in the github site of the project:

For example, if using Debian, these are the instructions:

The procedure is shown below, some dependencies are installed, a repository is added, and then the apt package manager is used to install the tool:

Install PowerShell
# Install system components
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y curl gnupg apt-transport-https

# Import the public repository GPG keys
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -

# Register the Microsoft Product feed
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packages.microsoft.com/repos/microsoft-debian-stretch-prod stretch
main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/microsoft.list'

# Update the list of products
sudo apt-get update

# Install PowerShell
sudo apt-get install -y powershell

# Start PowerShell
pwsh

Install PnP.Powershell

In order to install the PnP.Powershell module, once Powershell is already installed, we simply need to run the command:

  • Install-Module -Name “PnP.PowerShell”

Inside a Powershell session. Below we provide an example:

Install PnP.PowerShell
yourworkstation:~$ pwsh
PowerShell 7.2.0
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.

https://aka.ms/powershell
Type 'help' to get help.

PS /home/john> Install-Module -Name "PnP.PowerShell"

Bacula Packages

We are taking Debian Buster as the example base system to proceed with the installation of the Bacula Enterprise Microsoft 365 Plugin. In this system, the installation is most easily done by adding the repository file suitable for the existing subscription and the Debian version utilized. An example would be /etc/apt/sources.list.d/bacula.list with the following content:

APT
# Bacula Enterprise
deb https://www.baculasystems.com/dl/@customer-string@/debs/bin/@version@/buster-64/ buster main
deb https://www.baculasystems.com/dl/@customer-string@/debs/m365/@version@/buster-64/ buster m365

After that, a run of apt update is needed:

APT install
apt update

Then, the plugin may be installed using:

APT install
apt install bacula-enterprise-m365-plugin

The plugin has two different packages implied that should be installed automatically with the command shown:

  • bacula-enterprise-m365-plugin

  • bacula-enterprise-m365-plugin-libs

Alternately, manual installation of the packages may be done after downloading the poackages from your Bacula Systems provided download area, and then using the package manager to install. An example:

APT install
dpkg -i bacula-enterprise-*

The package will install the following elements:

  • Jar libraries in /opt/bacula/lib (such as bacula-m365-plugin-x.x.x.jar and bacula-m365-plugin-libs-x.x.x.jar). Please note that the version of those jar archives is not aligned with the version of the package. However, that version will be shown in the joblog in a message like ‘Jar version:X.X.X’.

Note

Version in Jar Name

Version is included in the name of .jar files from Bacula Enterprise version 14.0.4. Before that, libraries were composed by: bacula-m365-plugin.jar, bacula-meta-plugin-1.0.0.jar and bacula-m365-plugin-libs-1.0.0.jar

  • Plugin connection file (m365-fd.so) in the plugins directory (usually /opt/bacula/plugins)

  • Backend file (m365_backend) that invokes the jar files in /opt/bacula/bin. This backend file searches for the most recent bacula-m365-plugin-x.x.x.jar file in order to launch it, even thought usually we should have only one file.

  • A collection of powershell files used in the Sharepoint module in /opt/bacula/bin.

Go back to Microsoft 365 (M365) Plugin article.