The idea behind client encryption is to treat each server/sysadmin as an
independent operator and with encryption done by the client the contents
of the tapes (or in our case, vtapes) wouldn't necessarily be accessible
to the amanda server operator.
Ultimately, server encryption gets us a little closer. We're already
transmitting the backups over ssh so that gets us some privacy over the
wire. I'll switch over one of my test systems to "server encryption" and
see how that works.
Thank you for the reply and the "bump"
Oscar
On 03/13/2015 03:33 PM, Debra S Baddorf wrote:
Since you’ve gotten no answers yet (I know very little): might this be
related to whether the client or the server
is the one doing the unpacking of the dump, and in turn, which one of
those also did the encrypting?
I do some encrypting on one small set of nodes, but the server does the
encrypting. I’m merely making sure the tapes
are encrypted so they can be stored remotely. Any reason why you have the
client itself doing the encryption?
I suppose it is more private that way ….. specially if the data is going over
the network and might be seen there.
This is by way of starting a discussion, and also “bump”.
Deb Baddorf
Fermilab
On Mar 12, 2015, at 5:21 PM, Oscar Ricardo Silva <[email protected]> wrote:
I've been testing encrypted storage of backups but am confused as to how to restore
files. In my setup, I run the backup server with other sysadmins running the individual
servers being backed up and ideally I'd like for these sysadmins to restore files from
the client systems without bothering me ... I mean "without involving me" ...
I've had no luck restoring files using amrecover (one server encrypted with
amcrypt-ossl and another with amcrypt-ossl-asym) so I decided to review the man
page and saw:
***************************
Note
The Default values are those set at compile-time. Use amrestore to recover
client-encrypted or client-custom-compressed tapes.
***************************
Does this mean that for the sysadmin of a client to restore files from an
encrypted backup, they can only use amrestore and not amrecover? amrestore
suggests (and I might be wrong) that the individual running it know a lot about
how the backups are stored.
The backups *SEEM* to run OK and using amrecover I can even browse the files
that were backed up.
I've reviewed the amanda HOWTOs and FAQ but while they describe the setup for
encrypted storage of backups, I don't believe there are examples on restoring
files.
Oscar
