Re: [BackupPC-users] can't call method deflate on undefined value

[<cba...@us...>]

"Andy Alsup" writes:

> perl -e 'use Compress::Zlib; print deflateInit, "\n";'
> 
> is
> 
> Compress::Zlib::deflateStream=SCALAR(0x804ca4c)0

Did you run this as the BackupPC user?  Perhaps there is a permissions
problem on the installation of Compress::Zlib?

> So then, I changed line 250 to write to STDERR, and the same error occurs.
> 
> I have compress set to 0, to see if that would avoid this area of code, and
> apparently it doesn't.  Should it?

This is very mysterious.  Yes indeed: setting CompressLevel to 0
should disable any calls to Compress::Zlib.

You could temporarily change the code to make sure compression is
really off.  At around line 84, if you set $CompZlibOK to 0 instead
of 1 then compression should certainly be off:

    if ( $@ ) {
        #
        # Compress::Zlib doesn't exist.  Define some dummy constant
        # subs so that the code below doesn't barf.
        #
        eval {
            sub Z_OK         { return 0; }
            sub Z_STREAM_END { return 1; }
        };
        $CompZlibOK = 0;
    } else {
        $CompZlibOK = 1;        # <---- change this to a 0.
    }

Since you are testing from the command-line with BackupPC_dump -v -f <host>,
I would recommend adding some debug statements to lib/BackupPC/FileZIO.pm.
For example, you could add some debug statements to FileZIO::open() and
FileZIO::myDeflateInit().

I've never heard of an issue like this before so I suspect some
unusual installation, permissions, or setup issue.

Craig