Timothy Murphy wrote: > Nils Breunese (Lemonbit) wrote: > >> Timothy Murphy wrote: >> >>> Nils Breunese (Lemonbit) wrote: >>> >>>>> Is there incidentally a simple test to determine >>>>> if ssh is working as required by BackupPC? >>>> >>>> See if the BackupPC user can login on the client without entering a >>>> password. >>> >>> Thanks for your comments, which are mostly helpful. >>> >>> However, I think the above was slightly misleading. >>> I have BackupPC working perfectly on 4 computers (server + 3 >>> clients), >>> but in no case can backuppc on the server >>> ssh into any of the client machines >>> without being asked for a password; >>> and when asked for a password I cannot give one, >>> since backuppc does not have one. >>> >>> I can ssh onto root on the client machines, eg with >>> ssh -l root mary >> >> I don't really understand the difference. That last example is what I >> meant. If you cannot SSH into the machines, you cannot run backups >> over SSH. > > It's just a matter of language, I guess. > When you say "you can SSH into the machines" > I take that to mean that you can say > ssh <remote machine> > I suspect that is what most newbies to backuppc (like me) will think, > which is probably why the official documentation is hard to untangle.
I gave an example that read 'ssh usern...@client', not 'ssh client'. >>>> The public key of the backuppc user needs to be in the >>>> authorized_keys >>>> file of the user account on the client. Also see >>>> http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/ssh.html >>> >>> That is what I found to be the essential point in getting BackupPC >>> working. >>> Amazingly, it did not see to be stated clearly in any of the >>> tutorials >>> I looked at. >> >> Well, it's in the official docs and it's standard procedure for using >> SSH with public key authentication. > > Where exactly do you think it says this in the official docs? At the link I mentioned above. http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/ssh.html says: "Key exchange To allow BackupPC to ssh to the client as root, you need to place BackupPC's public key into root's authorized list on the client. (...)" > You say it is standard procedure; > but it is not normal to ssh into a machine as a different user, Why not? You login as the user you want to login as. > and in the case of backuppc it is not clear that this is what is > being done, > unless one looks "behind the scenes". I thought that was pretty clear actually. If you want to login as a specific user which is different from the username you are currently logged in as, you have to somehow tell ssh. No way around that. > In my view, BackupPC is an excellent program, > with two large provisos: > the documentation is very bad, I disagree completely. The docs on the site are excellent in my view. Much better than for a lot of other open source tools I use. Do you know about the BackupPC wiki? You can post clearer instructions there if you have any. Or ask Craig to include specific changes. > and the error messages (the 4 bytes nonsense) are even worse. That one might be hard to tackle at first, yes. If you or someone else could contribute a patch that would make this better, by all means let the list know. Nils Breunese. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
