Various tech tips 2023-03-26

This is a collection of some random issues that I couldn't easily find a solution for online, for which I figure others might have the same issue.

Google Drive review for items "flagged for abuse"

• Review form is at https://docs.google.com/u/0/requestreview?id=[docid] — it can be triggered within Google Drive only by sharing an item, as its owner (e.g. team drives make this impossible), with a new person, for a single item at a time; that will trigger a failure, which gives a link to request review using this URL. There doesn't appear to be any way to search for these, request review in bulk, or get/give any reasons.
• Google policy about requesting review

Getting Synology Active Backup for Business to rsync on a shared host

I wanted to back up a home folder on a shared host. Synology Active Backup for Business fails at this, because the host does not allow enumerating /home and ABB won't allow entering a path manually.

It can be done as follows, at least on Active Backup for Business version 2.5.0-12631:

1. Add the server, a backup task, etc as usual, and for the directory to back up, select something distinctive and visible to you like /var. Don't run the backup yet.
2. SSH to your Synology box as a sudo capable user.
3. Run this (replacing with your values) to identify the task that has your signal-value folder and replace it with what you actually want:

   $ sudo sqlite3 /volume1/\@ActiveBackup/agentless/db/sessiondb.sqlite
   SQLite version 3.41.2 2023-03-22 11:56:21
   Enter ".help" for usage hints.
   sqlite> .mode json
   sqlite> select * from session_table;
   [{"sess_id":1,"task_id":3,"rsync_module":"","remote_path":"/some/other/host"},
   {"sess_id":2,"task_id":4,"rsync_module":"","remote_path":"/var"}]
   sqlite> UPDATE session_table set remote_path="/home/myshareduserpath" where sess_id = 2;
   sqlite> select * from session_table;
   [{"sess_id":1,"task_id":3,"rsync_module":"","remote_path":"/some/other/host"},
   {"sess_id":2,"task_id":4,"rsync_module":"","remote_path":"/home/myshareduserpath"}]
   sqlite> .q			
   			

That's it. Go to ABB on your Synology, edit the task where you had set it to e.g. /var, and you will see that it now has e.g. /home/myshareduserpath selected even though it still gives an error if you try to expand /home. Run backups however you like.

If you want to have multiple paths on the same folder, they will have incremented sess_idtask_id. I don't know for sure if this is mirrored in the main config database — /volume1/\@ActiveBackup/config.db tables device_table (servers) and task_table (backup schedules) — but I believe not. Also in case you want it, the SSH keys are at /volume1/\@ActiveBackup/agentless/device/*/ssh_key.