Thanks to all who replied. You all basically confirmed my feeling that using 
our web server as the backup server was not best practice. I just hoped we 
might get by without buying another computer, even though it wouldn't need to 
be a very expensive one. The only spare computer we have now is an old XP box 
with some type of Celeron processor. Maybe I'll use that to set up a test 
system, then get a better one for production.

One additional question: are there any advantages to any particular flavor of 
Linux for BPC?

Mike

On Mar 10, 2011, at 9:10 AM, Michael Stowe wrote:

>> I'm looking at BackupPC and other options for a network-wide backup system
>> in the museum where I work. We have about 10 Windows computers, one OS X,
>> one web server running CENTOS 5.5, and an NAS (and may be adding another).
>> Note that my Linux knowledge is still limited but growing as I look at
>> more open source stuff.
>> 
>> I've been reading the documentation and various other things on the web,
>> and one basic question I'm unsure about is whether it is possible or
>> advisable to run BPC on the web server. Is this even possible given the
>> Apache needs of BPC? It does seem that the program would work best on
>> dedicated computer, and then copy or archive the backups to another disk
>> or NAS for safety. But since we currently only have one Linux machine
>> (which is 64 bit and has open slots for additional drives), I was
>> wondering if it could be used, perhaps by limiting access of the cgi
>> scripts to localhost or network ip addresses. Also, if it is run on the
>> server, can it backup parts of the file system on the server? For example,
>> backup /var/www/html to its pool.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> Apache can have per-directory and per-virtual controls.  Having all the
> backups on an externally-facing web server is a really bad idea only from
> a security standpoint -- since a compromised server would essentially
> provide access to every file everywhere as well as authentication
> information for every machine (depending on how you set it up.)  If it's
> an internal server, there's not a whole lot of worry, then.
> 
> Backing up the server from the same server guards against everything but
> complete loss of the server (obviously) so if you're concerned at all
> about losing the web server, you probably want to also consider archiving
> your backups at the very least.
> 
>> Thanks for any help.
>> 
>> Mike
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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