Hi, Oriol de los Santos wrote on 13.04.2007 at 18:45:51 [[BackupPC-users] Using BackupPC with rsync but with conections initiated by the clients]: > I've been reading the documentation for BackupPC and it seems that the only > way to use rsync is to have the BackupPC server initiate the conections with > the clients (which from my point of view is a bit of a security issue).
hmm, the other way around, each client machine you are backing up would potentially have access to read and/or overwrite other client machines' backups or even destroy the complete pool. You may or may not be more comfortable with that. It all depends on your point of view, as does the security issue you see. Are you worried about malicious actions from the real BackupPC server or someone imposing as the BackupPC server? > In my case I would be interested in having the client initiate the conection > instead of being the server that does so (I undertand that in that way > BackupPC will lose some of its usefulness as a centrally managed backup > system) > > Is it possible to initiate the rsync backup from the client and being able > to take advantage of BackupPC for ensuring that checksums in the server side > don't take as much CPU, ... etc? Not really, unless you copy them from the client to <somewhere else> and then let BackupPC backup that location (which may be on the BackupPC server machine or a third machine, to which the BackupPC server has access). That sounds rather awkward though and does not fit in well with BackupPC's notion of deciding rather freely when it will run the backups. The common suggestion to this question seems to be to use rsyncd. That way you don't need any form of shell access to the client host, and you can better limit read access to a subset of your files than you could with sudo (or ssh) for instance. I'm not sure whether rsyncd authentication is more than a plaintext password exchange though. If you end up tunnelling rsyncd through a VPN (or even ssh), you can at least initiate that from the client host. For completeness, backing up the exports of an NFS server works well (if probably a bit slow) via NFS if they are exported to your BackupPC server (with no_root_squash) anyway. The same probably holds for any other form of network file system. Hope that helps. Regards, Holger ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now. http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
