This solved the “connection failure: Error getting response stream” error in duplicati for me on Kubuntu 12. Takes 15 minutes at most.

Duplicati Skydrive error

What’s the error message?

So when I’m setting up duplicati for use with Microsoft’s Skydrive I get an authentication error:

Connection Failed: Error getting response stream: (write: the authentication or decryption has failed.): SendFailure

As in this Google Groups thread.

Solution, no the other solution!

The solution suggested in the thread is to use mozroots to install the Firefox security certificates. Which is great, except that mozroots for me requires me to “sudo apt-get install mono-devel” which results in this:

[…] libmono-webmatrix-data4.0-cil libmono-windowsbase3.0-cil libmono-windowsbase4.0-cil libnunit-cil-dev libnunit2.5-cil mono-devel mono-dmcs
mono-xbuild
0 upgraded, 119 newly installed, 0 to remove and 304 not upgraded.
Need to get 15.8 MB of archives.
After this operation, 53.7 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.

Install and run mozroots

So as as space is tight on my system and as mozroots is only 19kB I decided that perhaps installing all of 50+MB wasn’t really worth it. Instead of that here’s what to do.

1. Download the mono-devel package that apt-get suggests.
   1. sudo apt-get install mono-devel -s will simulate the install, note the name of the package.
   2. go to Ubuntu packages domain and get the file, for me this was http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/all/mono-devel/download.
2. Extract the deb file to a local directory, then find the mozroots and mozroots.exe files, note where they are in the file structure.
3. Copy the mozroots file (a short linking script) and the mozroots.exe file to their places in your file system, for me that means:
   1. sudo cp ./mozroots /usr/bin/
   2. sudo cp ./mozroots.exe /usr/lib/mono/4.0/
4. Run “mozroots --import --sync“

Mozroots now gives me the following output:

$ mozroots –import –sync
Mozilla Roots Importer – version 2.10.8.1
Download and import trusted root certificates from Mozilla’s MXR.
Copyright 2002, 2003 Motus Technologies. Copyright 2004-2008 Novell. BSD licensed.

Downloading from ‘http://mxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/security/nss/lib/ckfw/builtins/certdata.txt?raw=1’…
Importing certificates into user store…
140 new root certificates were added to your trust store.
Import process completed.

Hooray!

And now duplicati works with Skydrive, or at least it connects and creates a folder in setup. More testing to do to check that everything else is running. Enough to say that this has solved the authentication error.

Files

These are the two files, WordPress won’t let me upload a shell script so , the script file is as follows:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/bin/mono $MONO_OPTIONS /usr/lib/mono/4.0/mozroots.exe “$@”

And here’s the .exe that goes in your mono libraries: mozroots.exe. You’ll of course want to run a virus check on that one!