Steve,
The amanda-client can be run with any user.
The user is compiled in, but it doesn't need to be the same on the
amanda server and amanda-client.
What was the problem?
Jean-Louis
On 09/01/17 02:41 PM, Steve Wray wrote:
For what its worth, this creates problems with inter-operability
between CentOS and Debian; we rebuilt the CentOS rpm for amanda client
so it used the backup user instead of amanda, as our amanda server was
on Debian. We tried hard but never found a way to configure this.
It would be nice to be able to configure this and not have to have it
compiled in.
On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 11:21 AM, Nathan Stratton Treadway
<natha...@ontko.com <mailto:natha...@ontko.com>> wrote:
On Sun, Jan 08, 2017 at 12:51:45 -0700, Charles Curley wrote:
> May I request you end two irritants about the Debian version. It
creates
> a user, "backup". That's fine, although "amanda", say, would avoid
> stepping on some other user named "backup".
>
> The irritant is that debian makes the user's home
> directory /var/backups. Something else uses that directory, and
I don't
> like co-mingling the two different functions. It also sets the user
> shell to "/usr/sbin/nologin" rather than to bash, which is an
irritant
> on the way to using amanda over ssh.
>
For what it's worth, the "backup" user (uid 34) -- including its home
directory and login shell settings -- is actually defined on all
Debian
systems as part of the base-passwd package (and thus exist completely
separately from the Amanda packages).
See, for example:
https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/users/cjwatson/base-passwd.git/tree/passwd.master
<https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/users/cjwatson/base-passwd.git/tree/passwd.master>
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s9.2.2
<https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s9.2.2>
(_Debian Policy Manual_ "9.2.2 UID and GID classes")
I've always figured that whoever did the original Debian packaging for
the Amanda software (years ago) decided it would be easier to make use
of that pre-existing user rather than having to have the package
installation scripts manage creation (and deletion) of a separate
"amanda" user....
Interestingly, /usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.txt.gz
doesn't
seem to know what the "backup" user is for, either:
backup
Presumably so backup/restore responsibilities can be locally
delegated to
someone without full root permissions?
HELP: Is that right? Amanda reportedly uses this, details?
.... so I suspect that this user was "allocated" in the early mists of
time for the Debian project, and since then has mostly or completely
fallen out of use -- except for the use by the Amanda packages....
Nathan
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