Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Holger Parplies wrote:
> 
>> actually, ssh is most useful for inter-realm access. On my local intranet,
>> password and data snooping are not a real threat. I use ssh anyway, out of
>> habit.
> 
> Surely it is quite difficult to use anything else on a Linux system?
> What is the alternative?

Rsync in daemon mode works in linux as well as windows.  But Linux 
admins normally have experience with ssh.


>> But who says my user name for my university account, work account,
>> home account are all identical?
> 
> Fortunately I am lucky enough to be able to use the same name everywhere.

That just means that ssh inserts the originating user name as a default 
for you on the destination side.  No difference otherwise.

>>
>> 1.) There is an evident misconception of the scope of BackupPC.
>>     ssh is not part of BackupPC.which access is actually used.
> 
> The difference between us is, in brief, that I don't want to know
> 99 ways of doing something,
> and I don't want to have to read the Encyclopedia Britannica
> in order to find out how to turn on the oven.

The difference between learning to use a tool and turning on an 
appliance is that you'll find another use for the tool tomorrow whereas 
your oven knob will never do anything else for you.  If you don't like 
reusable tools that each do one thing well, you should probably stay 
away from unix-like operating systems.

> I imagine 99% of people use rsync with BackupPC on Linux systems,
> so personally I would prefer the other methods to be relegated
> to an appendix.

I have some systems running tar.  But the ssh setup is the same.

> I also imagine 99% of people download a binary version of BackupPC,
> so the basic question is what changes from the default one has to make.

Binary? You mean one that some packager has modified to adapt to a 
distribution?  Then you should get documentation with the package since 
no one else will know what changes have been made.

> In my case the only change on the clients
> is to specify the directories I want to backup,
> and the only change on the server is to specify which machines
> are allowed to access it.
> 
> The rest is setting up ssh to work as root on the clients,
> and this requires 3 steps:
> 1. ssh-keygen as root on the client
> 2. scp .ssh/id_rsa.pub from /root on the client to the server
>    and append to ~backuppc/.ssh/authorized_keys .

You have that backwards.  The private side of the key pair belongs in 
the .ssh directory under the home of the originator of the command.  The 
public part is appended to the authorized_keys or authorized_keys2 file 
in the .ssh directory under the home of the target of the command.  The 
remote side is going to use the public key to make sure that the 
originator can read the private key on the originating system before 
continuing.

> 3. run "ssh -l root <client>" as backuppc on the server.

That part is right.

> In other words, as far as I can see,
> complete instructions could be given on half a page,
> at least in the case of CentOS-5.2, which I am using.

Yes, but the instructions belong to ssh, not backuppc.  You can run any 
command remotely with ssh.

> Maybe other distributions are more complicated?

Ssh is separate in all of them.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com

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