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.

>>> 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?

You say it is standard procedure;
but it is not normal to ssh into a machine as a different user,
and in the case of backuppc it is not clear that this is what is being done,
unless one looks "behind the scenes".

In my view, BackupPC is an excellent program,
with two large provisos:
the documentation is very bad,
and the error messages (the 4 bytes nonsense) are even worse.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland


------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
BackupPC-users mailing list
BackupPC-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
List:    https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users
Wiki:    http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net
Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/