CrashPlan 6.5 stuck on Connecting… and never times out

We had a couple of clients who would just never do an initial connection to CrashPlan after the upgrade from CrashPlan 4 to CrashPlan 6.5. But they would never time out or give an error message either.

Restarting the CrashPlan service didn’t help. Restarting the computer didn’t help. Uninstalling and reinstalling the client didn’t help.

Turns out it if the detect-a-user script can’t find a CP_USER_HOME, it will just keep trying to connect instead of erroring out. We modified our script, and now those clients are good (we did have to uninstall and reinstall the client after modifying the script, though).

P.S. Someone pointed out that I don’t actually share the original or modified script. The point of this blog post isn’t to say “Here’s a script that works.” There are lots of scripts that work. The point is more that if you’re experiencing this issue (“connecting” and never timing out or providing an error message), you likely need to fix your script to output a CP_USER_HOME).

Posted

May 2, 2018

Uncategorized

alanysiu

Tags:

crashplan, macos, troubleshooting

Comments

2 responses to “CrashPlan 6.5 stuck on Connecting… and never times out”

tony

October 22, 2018

hi alan – pls can you point me to your script that fixed the issue ?

Reply
1. Alan Siu
  
  October 22, 2018
  
  Someone pointed out that I don’t actually share the original or modified script. The point of this blog post isn’t to say “Here’s a script that works.” There are lots of scripts that work. The point is more that if you’re experiencing this issue (“connecting” and never timing out or providing an error message), you likely need to fix your script to output a CP_USER_HOME).
  
  So any script that outputs a CP_USER_HOME. It could be as simple as
  USER_NAME=$(/usr/bin/defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow lastUserName)
  CP_USER_HOME=”/Users/$USER_NAME”
  
  (That one may not work so well after a reboot.)
  
  Again, that is not our script. And our script isn’t the point. The point is that there must be a CP_USER_HOME assigned within the script. You can assign it any way you wish.
  
  Reply