Settings lost and server backups seemingly affected

RouterOS The Dude
1

I had to do a restart of our Windows Home Server 2011 computer last night. The Dude was running and configured on the server, but after the restart, I found that all the settings were gone – back to factory default settings.

Looking through the forums, I found a few (not many) mentions of similar problems of settings being lost on reboot. Are the settings really lost, or just not being re-loaded properly?

In addition, I found that my server backup operations have been failing… since the day I installed The Dude. Possibly a coincidence. I saved the Dude conf folder elsewhere, then uninstalled The Dude so I can check backups over a couple of days, before contemplating a re-install. (the conf folder saved in case there is any chance of retrieving my settings, maps, etc).

Was running The Dude 3.6…

Thoughts?

2

Where are the settings/configuration for The Dude kept?

Are there permissions settings which need to be setup a particular way on the host server in order for The Dude settings to be maintained?

Is there a way to check that the settings are being saved?

Are any of these behaviors different between The Dude 3.6 and version 4.0? (the question behind that question is: would my settings-saving problem be any better using version 4.0?)

3

Reading through more posts in the MikroTik forums, it doesn’t seem that the version 4.0b3 software is ready for prime time (hence, the “beta” in its name), so my question on that is moot.

I did re-install 3.6 on the Windows Home Server 2011 computer. When I went back in, it was, no surprise, as if I had just installed it. I had.

However, I had kept the “data” folder from my original installation… desperate move, as I didn’t have any other direction to go at the time. So, I copied it back into the “Dude” program folder.

No dice. The program came back up again as if it were brand new.

Hmmm. Not being willing to accept defeat (quite yet), I opted for a different tactic. This time, I went back to the “Dude” program folder, change the permission to give “user” full control. Again, I copied the “data” folder back into the “Dude” program folder.

Bingo! When I restarted the program, it came up with my original network map (which I had spent a lot of time building).

At that point, I exported a backup XML file… just in case.

Now I’m wondering – why was this a problem to begin with? There doesn’t appear to be any means to re-point The Dude to use a different location for the data folder, and there is no explicit “save” command… “export” is as close as it comes. No errors are thrown regarding program access permissions… it “just works”… right up to the point when it doesn’t.

Perhaps the program needs to use the “Program Data” folder off of the root (hidden folder, for anyone who is otherwise unfamiliar with it) as a location for the program data. By default, the program folder has stricter permissions, and the program data folder might be more appropriate.

Heck, I don’t even know if this is actually the problem… but I do know that at one point I had lost my data, and after the permissions change – it was back.

The program is good, though has some rough edges (for free, they’re pretty easy to overlook).

Hoping that what was related here might help somebody. Would really like to get some conversation going on this; is there some better practice to use regarding configuring the data storage for The Dude? Losing data is just hard to abide.

Pat

4

For newer installations win7 and such people should disable UAC. You solved this by giving “user” full control. There is one oddball file dude.conf that gets written (or not) to c:\ and I don’t know what happens if that is not allowed, probably stuff you saw.

The dude 3.6 is XML based and there is an XML file in the dude data folder, in 4.3 this data is stored in a compressed database. I don’t know if they took individual XML sections left it as XML and stored that into the database or made new table/data structures. Anyhow no one has mentioned that they have directly edited the 4.3 database data to resolve a corruption issue. Access to the data in 4.3 has not been past the discussion phase as far as I know.

Either way if you are trying to copy or backup the dude folder you will need to stop the service since the xml or database files are open while the dude is running. I don’t know if the shadow copy functions work for the dude for backup purposes… I don’t know if you can restore from an enterprise backup either. I hope I don’t ever need to know any of that stuff since it means I had to find out.

Lebowski