Teleporter (Backup/Restore) Behavior vs OS or Browser

jsnell · June 16, 2023, 10:24pm

On a MAC running SAFARI Pi-Hole Teleporter saves a .tar file.
On a WINDOWS 11 machine using EDGE, Teleporter saves a .tar.gz file.
Teleporter RESTORE only looks for (enables) download of .tgz, .gz files.
Solution: MACOS has a command line gzip program.
In the Pi-Hole web interface (using SAFARI), create a Teleporter backup. it will be saved in your ~/Downloads directory. Open Terminal (it typically opens in ~ (your home directory) use cd ~/Downloads to change to the directory that contains the backup. Use ls (list) like this: ls -l pi-hole to find all of the backups. Now use the gzip command to create zipped copies of the backups (so that the Pi-Hole Admin Interface can download them ... use gzip -kv pi-hole to (k) keep the original file, and (v) be 'verbose' display information as it runs, against all the archives the previous ls command found. Or you can just zip one file by using its complete name.

In WINDOWS using EDGE the Teleporter creates .gzip files automatically, so you will never notice this problem.

Perhaps the developers can add plain old *.tar to the file selection mask to avoid this problem all together?

John

rdwebdesign · June 16, 2023, 11:00pm

The PHP code generating the backup archive always adds the .gz extension and uses the application/gzip MIME type:

github.com

pi-hole/AdminLTE/blob/3a11976ee8ecc50e2dd9efd76caad1ad41894dd5/scripts/pi-hole/php/teleporter.php#L607


      
          
          
archive_add_file('/etc/pihole/', 'setupVars.conf');
          archive_add_file('/etc/pihole/', 'dhcp.leases');
          archive_add_file('/etc/pihole/', 'custom.list');
          archive_add_file('/etc/pihole/', 'pihole-FTL.conf');
          archive_add_file('/etc/', 'hosts', 'etc/');
          archive_add_directory('/etc/dnsmasq.d/', 'dnsmasq.d/');
          
          
$archive->compress(Phar::GZ); // Creates a gzipped copy
          unlink($archive_file_name); // Unlink original tar file as it is not needed anymore
          $archive_file_name .= '.gz'; // Append ".gz" extension to ".tar"
          
          
header('Content-type: application/gzip');
          header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
          header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='.$filename);
          header('Content-length: '.filesize($archive_file_name));
          header('Pragma: no-cache');
          header('Expires: 0');
          if (ob_get_length() > 0) {
              ob_end_clean();
          }

Probably your browser or OS is changing the file extension, on save.

rdwebdesign · June 16, 2023, 11:13pm

Apparently this is a "Feature" from Safari.

You need to disable the option to automatically open files on download:

chrislph · June 17, 2023, 12:23am

I had this same problem with a friend's Pi-hole recently. His Safari had "helpfully" unzipped the .tar.gz, leaving it as just a .tar which Teleporter won't recognise (and nor should it have to accommodate Safari's interference). I fixed it using the same approach described by @jsnell John above to add the .gz back again.

jsnell · June 17, 2023, 5:21am

Thanks!
I’m getting very tired of trying to keep up with MACOS ‘improvements’.

At the very least, these two solutions are posted where future seekers can find ‘em …. hopefully.

Appreciate the effort guys.

jfb · June 28, 2023, 8:31pm

You want to disable the last option shown on this screen shot (open "safe" files, in the Safari preferences):