Press "Enter" to skip to content

BorgBackup Repository on DSM 7.0

Last updated on January 26, 2023

A few years back I began using Borg for backing up nuxx.net, sending it home to my Synology DSM 1019+. At the time this was running the 6.x family of DSM and worked great, but it broke after moving to v7.0. Attempts to run Borg would result in this error:

/var/services/homes/borguser/borg: error while loading shared libraries: libz.so.1: failed to map segment from shared object

This appears to be happening because with the upgrade to v7.0 /tmp is mounted noexec.

adminuser@diskstation:/var/services/homes/borguser$ mount | grep /tmp
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec)
adminuser@diskstation:/var/services/homes/borguser$

While a few online solutions (such as this one) propose remounting /tmp with exec, this is a poor solution as it changes the security model for DSM v7.0 and may break in the future during an upgrade. The best solution for this is to create a private temp directory for just borguser and define it as $TMPDIR.

To do this create ~borguser/tmp, ensure it’s owned by your Borg user, and set it to 700:

mkdir ~borguser/tmp
chown borguser:users ~borguser/tmp
chmod 700 ~borguser/tmp

Then create a wrapper script for Borg setting this variable. The result will be Borg using ~borguser/tmp for it’s private temporary directory, leaving /tmp alone, working nicely with the DSM v7.0 security design. I keep mine in ~borguser/.ssh and call it borg.sh. And, be sure it’s executable. Mine is like this:

adminuser@diskstation:/var/services/homes/borguser$ sudo cat .ssh/borg.sh
!/bin/sh
export TMPDIR=$HOME/tmp
/var/services/homes/borguser/borg serve --storage-quota 120G --restrict-to-repository /volume2/Backups/borg
adminuser@diskstation:/var/services/homes/borguser$ sudo ls -als .ssh/borg.sh
4 -rwx------ 1 borguser root 161 Nov 15 06:56 .ssh/borg.sh
adminuser@diskstation:/var/services/homes/borguser$

Finally, change ~borguser/.ssh/authorized_keys limiting the backup user to executing the new script.

command="/var/services/homes/backupuser/.ssh/borg.sh",restrict,from="192.168.0.23" ssh-rsa AAAA[...restofkeygoeshere...] remoteuser@remoteserver.example.com