Hi there, On Tue, 19 Nov 2024, Divan Santana wrote:
... Yeah, I found that hit via search engines. I don't find that website very good. That article is very out of date, apache is not in ports on OpenBSD, perhaps because they have their own webserver. I tried that method, but alas there is no apache in OpenBSD. I guess I could try compile it.
It shouldn't be too difficult to do that if you have a recent compiler but now I'm looking at articles like https://www.cambus.net/the-state-of-toolchains-in-openbsd/ I begin to wonder if OpenBSD isn't a headache you don't need for your backup system. I do understand there are arguments in favour of it, but to run BackupPC I think you really do need to be able to build fairly recent software which can be problematic for older compilers.
There is backuppc directly in OpenBSD ports. It seems to work, but I have no idea how to setup the web front end and without it, I have no idea how to manage backuppc.
I have never used the Web interface for setting up BackupPC. In fact I'm not even sure that I'd know how to do it that way! One thing I've heard when people use the Web interface for configuration is that all the comments in the original configuration file get deleted, so using 'diff' to see what's changed from the original won't be very helpful. Presumably that's still the case but I don't know for sure, maybe one of the other readers will be able to say. I really only use the Web interface for daily monitoring the state of my backups. Basically I keep the page http://piplus.local.jubileegroup.co.uk/BackupPC_Admin?action=summary open in a tab permanently, and I refresh it daily just to check that all the machines are still being backed up. Very occasionally one of the remotes will lose its VPN route or something like that. But it's possible to get more or less the same functionality by running a cron job to look at the per-machine files. .... You can easily get BackupPC going, just by editing files; in a pinch you can check that backups are happening by looking at the log files in /var/lib/BackupPC/pc/*/; and you can even recover backups if you use BackupPC executables such as BackupPC_tarCreate. You would not have the convenience, visibility and flexibility which is offered by the Web interface, that's all. Well I suppose that's quite a lot. :( The files you'd need to edit are in the configuration directory, most likely that's /etc/BackupPC/. The files are 'config.pl' and 'hosts'. The system will operate with very few changes. Some candidate values for change in 'config.pl' are 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- $Conf{FullKeepCnt} $Conf{FullKeepCntMin} $Conf{FullAgeMax} and a few others I won't mention here to do with scheduling which you probably won't need to touch to begin with. You need to set $Conf{XferMethod} for your preference, and e.g. if you use rsyncd also $Conf{RsyncdUserName} $Conf{RsyncdPasswd} If you have remote machines with longish RTTs then maybe adjust $Conf{PingMaxMsec} If you want email alerts $Conf{EMailAdminUserName} $Conf{EMailUserDestDomain} To keep more up to date I set $Conf{EMailNotifyOldBackupDays} = 1; because the default was 7 (at least it was years ago) and I don't like to think that I might not hear of a failed backup for more than a week. 8<---------------------------------------------------------------------- The changes to 'hosts' are very simple, here are the first couple of lines added at the bottom of my copy 'hosts'. alpha 0 backuppc beta 0 backuppc (Somebody here likes Greek names for their machines...:) The names need to be resolvable in your local DNS. Read the extensive comments in the two files for more information. You can tailor the backup characteristics for individual machines by creating files called 'machinename.pl' in /etc/BackupPC/pc/ which contain fragments of the configuration to override the configuration in /etc/BackupPC - but you don't have to do that. I tend to use that feature to limit what gets backed up in e.g. workstation machines, so that I'm not backing up gigabytes of browser caches and similar junk. A Raspberry Pi can make a cheap backup system. I've used one for a few years. You can run Debian on them now and everything you need should be packaged. Maybe easier than struggling with OpenBSD/VMs? -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: https://github.com/backuppc/backuppc/wiki Project: https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/
