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 username@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.

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