Datto Linux Agent (DLA): Release notes

Topic

This article contains software release notes for the Datto Linux Agent.

To learn more about the Datto Linux Agent, see our Getting Started with the Datto Linux Agent article.

Environment

  • Datto Linux Agent

Description

Index

Agent Version 3.0.16.0 - 2023-03-21

2020

2019

2018

Agent Version 1.0.13 - 2017-11-17

Agent Version 1.0.6 - 2016-12-05

dattobd hotfix 0.11.8.1 - 2024-09-24

Bug Fixes:

  • NULL Pointer Dereference on Backup:
    Fixed the issue with a NULL pointer deference causing system crashes during backups on RHEL 8.10 and Rocky 8.10 .

Agent Version 3.0.23.0 and DattoBD 0.11.8 - 2024-09-09

Bug Fixes:

  • Kernel Panic on Reboot with Specific Kernel Versions:
    Addressed an issue where systems running kernel version 5.15.0-94-generic encountered kernel panics during reboot after installing the latest Datto Linux Agent (DLAD). Systems now reboot gracefully without user intervention, even with Docker installed.
  • DattoDB Persistence After System Reboot:
    Fixed a problem where DattoDB was not found in the expected directory after a soft reboot, leading to backup failures on RHEL 9.x systems with ext4 filesystems. The agent now correctly identifies DattoDB after reboots, ensuring smooth backup operations.
  • Kernel Module Build Failure on RHEL and Rocky Linux:
    Resolved an issue where the dattobd kernel module failed to build on systems upgraded to kernel version 5.14.0-427.16.1.el9_4, preventing backups. The module now builds successfully, allowing backups to proceed without errors.
  • Incorrect Backup Type After Reboot on Ubuntu 20.04:
    Fixed an issue where the agent performed a DIFF_MERGE backup instead of an incremental backup after rebooting Ubuntu 20.04 desktop systems. The agent now correctly performs incremental backups post-reboot.

Known Issues:

  • DLA Might Cause Docker Commands to Hang
  • Under certain conditions, the Datto Linux Agent (DLA) may cause Docker commands to become unresponsive.
  • On some operating systems, a differential merge may be incorrectly triggered following a soft reboot or shutdown.
  • Screenshot Verification Unavailable for Alma/Rocky Linux
  • Devices running Alma or Rocky Linux are currently unable to perform screenshot verification.
  • The Datto Backup Driver (DattoBD) and Datto Linux Agent Driver (DLAD) do not currently support distribution upgrades.

Agent Version 3.0.16.0 and DattoBD 0.11.7 - 2024-02-21

New Feature:

  • Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9

Description:

  • DLA extends its compatibility to RHEL 9, allowing users to leverage Datto's backup capabilities on the latest RHEL release.
  • Please note, DLA support for RHEL 9 excludes XFS filesystems at this time, XFS support will be released through an appliance update.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue with files not being saved during Incremental backup
  • Updated the Datto Linux Agent installation to use the EPEL archive for RHEL 6
  • Fixed an issue that would run a Differential Merge after a system reboot impacting RHEL 7, and 8.
  • Addressed an issue where DLA agents running on kernel 4.17 and above experienced loss of incremental tracking post-reboot.
  • Resolved memory a bloat issue in DLA running on Ubuntu and Debian systems
  • Fixed a rare LVM issue with the COW file in /boot observed on RHEL 7.9 machine

Agent Version 3.0.16.0 - 2023-03-21

Improvements

  • The Datto Linux Agent introduces support for distros running kernels up to 5.15. Please note that for this release is only QAed with the following LTS releases. Support for additional releases (RHEL 9) and an updated agent for distros/releases currently covered by the 2.7.1.1 agent will be released soon.
    • Debian 11
    • REHL 8*
    • Ubuntu 20.04
    • Ubuntu 22.04

NOTE  *RHEL 8.4 is unsupported; please update to 8.5 or later.

  • Enhancements to validation of the COW file
  • Secure pairing for Datto Linux Agents

Fixes

  • Agent Uninstall
  • Errant message 'Success' string
  • Auto exclude BTRFS (and other unsupported file systems)
  • A condition that could lead to a lost diffmerge flag
  • Resume-ability state manager
  • Screenshots failing on DLA COW blowout
  • A condition that could result in crashing agents
  • Various security fixes and improvements

Agent Version 2.7.1.1 - 2020-10-28

Bug Fixes

Resolved an issue where including quiescing scripts would cause failed backups.

NOTE   This release (2.7.1) will be the last release with support for RHEL/CentOS 6.X, which is now EOL

Agent Version 2.7.1.0 - 2020-10-20

Bug Fixes

  • Various backend updates, performance improvements, and bug fixes

Agent Version 2.4.3.0 - 2020-03-18

Improvements

  • The Datto Linux Agent now supports new tools that can be used by Datto Technical Support to manually update root certificates in the event that a partner is unable to do so. See Root certificate expiration for details. For instructions on how to automatically update your Datto Linux Agent to the newest version, see Creating an auto-update script for the Datto Linux Agent.
  • The Datto Linux Agent now supports new tools that can be used by Datto Technical Support to collect diagnostic logs without the partner having to manually run commands. This new capability will save partners time and frustration when troubleshooting issues.

This release contains various backend updates, performance improvements, and bug fixes.

Agent Version 2.4.0.0 - 2020-02-26

Improvements

  • The Datto Linux Agent now has improved driver-specific error reporting for more precise problem diagnosis.
  • Datto Support technicians can now remotely reset the Datto Linux Agent to a freshly-installed state. This new feature reduces the dependency on agent reinstallation as a troubleshooting step.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue that caused the backup status bytes transferred field to remain at zero throughout a backup

Agent Version 2.3.0 / Driver Version 0.10.13 - 2020-02-05

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved an issue which could cause volumes larger than 1.5 TB in size to back up their full volume size, regardless of the type of backup

Agent Version 2.2.5.0 / Driver Version 0.10.11 - 2019-11-12

Improvements

  • To improve the efficiency of disk space usage, optimized the Copy-on-Write (COW) file creation process for /boot volumes to default to 10 MB instead of 100 MB

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved an issue in which a packaging error on SUSE Enterprise Linux could prevent the Datto Linux Agent from updating

  • Resolved an issue which prevented the use of custom bio->bi_flags values

Agent Version 2.1.23.0 - 2019-07-17

Improvements

  • Improved backup logic to prefer differential merges over full backups when the remote target contains a valid file system
  • Made agent logs available in /var/log

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved an issue in which the Linux differential merge expected transfer size was larger than the actual transfer size
  • Fixed a scenario in which calling /event with malformatted time values could crash the agent
  • Resolved an issue which caused DLA update and clean install of 2.1+ on CentOS6 to require a reboot
  • Fixed an issue which caused backups of XFS on 512e drives to fail to exclude unused ranges

Agent Version 2.1.28.0 / Driver Version 0.10.9 - 2019-04-15

Improvements

  • Enhanced the functionality of the agent paging file to allow Technical Support to optimize its performance in cases of very high and very low disk I/O
  • Introduced Oracle Enterprise Linux 6.9 (Santiago) compatibility for the Datto Linux Agent
  • Added logic to allow the Datto Linux Agent to read the BIOS UUID of protected virtual systems as a component of the VMX backup process
  • Improved backend error logging to enhance the visibility of key troubleshooting information for Technical Support
  • Improved the Datto Linux Agent's handling of virtual block devices in error states to facilitate more graceful handling of failed backups

Bug Fixes

  • Resolved an issue that prevented the Linux Agent's UnchangedBlockRageExcluder from working with volumes that have a block size greater than 4K
  • Fixed an issue which could prevent the Linux Agent from destroying virtual incremental tracking devices in error states
  • Corrected an issue which prevented the /event API endpoint used by the SIRIS from functioning as expected
  • Fixed an issue which could cause the DLA 2.1.21.0 /host API to fail to accurately display scriptsPrePost for quiescing scripts
  • Resolved an issue which could cause sub-optimal pairing security for non-Windows agents
  • Excluded ValidateLocalTargets failures caused by SQLlite errors from the criteria for backup failure
  • Fixed an issue in which /host could fail with a 'statvfs' error state
  • Corrected an issue in which FUSE filesystems on Linux were incorrectly writing reload scripts
  • Resolved an issue which could cause small volumes to fail to perform incremental backups
  • Fixed an issue which could cause the Linux Agent to incorrectly mark successful incremental backups as failed
  • Resolved an issue which could cause NTFS corruption for Unix platforms
  • Corrected an issue which could cause "Could not find device" errors to log multiple times during the snapshot phase if the driver device was destroyed
  • Resolved an issue which could cause FAT32 incrementals to corrupt backups
  • Corrected an issue which could cause file block exclusion to happen on the live volume instead of the snapshot
  • Fixed an issue in which exceeding max writes during the snapshot could cause subsequent backups to fail
  • Resolved an issue which caused the XFS parser to fail to calculate a correct free space allocation
  • Fixed the check that the Linux Agent performs to detect if a driver device is in an error state
  • Corrected an issue which could cause the Linux Agent to segfault during the copy loop if the next driver device was in an error state
  • Resolved an issue which caused the XFS parser to fails on root volumes on newer kernels
  • Fixed an issue which could cause device mapping of a volume to fail to appear in the host request
  • Disabled compilation of MercuryFTP transport via define

Driver Version 0.10.8 - 2018-12-18

Improvements

  • Various backend updates, performance improvements, and bug fixes

Agent Version 1.0.16 - 2018-09-18

NOTE  This is the last release for Fedora 26. The Linux Agent will still be available for this distribution, but it will no longer receive updates.

Improvements

  • Changed certificate generation to require TLSv1.1

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed certificate generation on SLE11

Agent Version 1.0.15 - 2018-07-10

Improvements

  • Added support for openSUSE 15
  • Added missing max_cow_megs to help text

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed initial alignment check, allowing backup of 4Kn volumes

Agent Version 1.0.14 - 2018-05-04

Bug Fixes

  • Fix packaging for Ubuntu 18.04 and openSUSE Leap 15.

Agent Version 1.0.13 - 2017-11-17

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed building packages for Fedora 27

Agent Version 1.0.12 - 2017-09-19

  • Various performance enhancements and code optimizations

Agent Version 1.0.11 - 2017-07-31

NOTE  This is the last release for openSUSE 13.2, Fedora 22, Fedora 23, and Ubuntu 12.04.

Improvements

  • Added support for Debian 9

Agent Version 1.0.10 - 2017-05-10

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed detection for multipath devices

Agent Version 1.0.9 - 2017-04-25

NOTE  This is the last release for openSUSE 13.1, Fedora 20, and Fedora 21.

Improvements

  • The Datto Linux Agent will no longer fail the service if it is unable to load a required module.
  • Logged a more descriptive message if the service is already running.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed device mappings of volumes not getting added to the host request
  • Added a workaround for resource starvation preventing HTTP request response when copying the incremental history

Agent Version 1.0.8 - 2017-03-06

  • Various performance enhancements and code optimizations

Agent Version 1.0.7 - 2017-01-23

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a problem with certificate verification during SIRIS requests
  • Fixed a problem which could cause backups to fail if there were multiple volumes with the same UUID where one was not mounted

Agent Version 1.0.6 - 2016-12-05

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a problem with persist-through-reboot for SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP2 and openSUSE Leap 42.2

Agent Version 1.0.5 - 2016-07-26

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a problem with backing up XFS volumes larger than about 350 GiB

Agent Version 1.0.4 - 2016-07-18

  • Various performance enhancements and code optimizations

Agent Version 1.0.3 - 2016-07-07

Improvements

  • Added more information to the event log request to help with problem diagnosis

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed persist through reboot on Ubuntu 16.04
  • Fixed a possible crash in certain syslog logging situations
  • Fixed a rare condition where it would be possible to start two backups at the same time if the requests came in close enough together
  • Fixed a problem where upgrading certain kernels caused kernel panics on boot

Agent Version 1.0.2 - 2016-06-06

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a threading problem where pre/post scripts may never time out
  • Added and fixed some logging to diagnose iscsitarget and diffmerge problems
  • Changed the API version from 1.0.1 to 1.0.0

Agent Version 1.0.1 - 2016-04-05

New Features

  • Added support for v5 XFS file system.

Improvements

  • Made the iSCSI target failure handling more robust; it no longer sends keepalives but instead will detect and attempt to recover from any kind of connection failure.
  • Changed diffmerge to avoid double reads for checksums where possible, making it faster on larger diffmerge devices. This improvement also increases the speed of all backups.
  • Fixes to the NTFS file system parser to handle fragmented used block bitmaps.

Agent Version 1.0.0 - 2016-02-26

Additional Resources