I finally got BackupPC working under Centos-7.1 after several hours of pain. I had been running it for several years under CentOS-6, and probably CentOS-5, but there seem to me to have been several new issues that arise with CentOS-7. In my experience, the official documentation on this, <http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html>, is more or less useless unless you have a very long time to spend. It suffers from the usual Linux disease of having inordinately long explanations of everything with no examples of the actual commands a real person has to give. The explanation in <https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/BackupPC> (which I only found later) is much better, though it starts with the warning "This page is no longer maintained, having been abandoned on 2009-09-17". I thought I'd write a 1-page note to myself of the steps I took, in preparation for CentOS-8... I have a couple of questions that this raises. 1. Why exactly does backuppc want to ssh to root? Is this just a way of running BackupPC as root? 2. The graphical interface seems to be treated as an extra, but what other way is there of accessing BackupPC? Is there a CLI approach? If so, where is the list of transfer requests kept? -- Timothy Murphy gayleard /at/ eircom.net School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin
Timothy Murphy wrote:> I thought I'd write a 1-page note to myself of the steps I took, > in preparation for CentOS-8... > I have a couple of questions that this raises. > > 1. Why exactly does backuppc want to ssh to root? > Is this just a way of running BackupPC as root? > > 2. The graphical interface seems to be treated as an extra, > but what other way is there of accessing BackupPC? > Is there a CLI approach? > If so, where is the list of transfer requests kept?Another small query. I see that BackupPC starts 6 copies of httpd running, but so far only 2 have ever been used. Can this number (6) be changed? -- Timothy Murphy gayleard /at/ eircom.net School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin
On 09/13/2015 01:35 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote:> I have a couple of questions that this raises. > > 1. Why exactly does backuppc want to ssh to root?To enable access to all of the files on the client. It is also possible to run the backup running the rsyncd- daemon on the client.> Is this just a way of running BackupPC as root?Why do you want this? It's not required to run backuppc as user root.> 2. The graphical interface seems to be treated as an extra, > but what other way is there of accessing BackupPC? > Is there a CLI approach?There are some CLI applications available, BackupPC_tarCreate for example to restore file from the command line. regards Ulf
On 09/13/2015 03:48 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote:> I see that BackupPC starts 6 copies of httpd running, > but so far only 2 have ever been used. > Can this number (6) be changed?Yes, in the configuration of you httpd. regards Ulf
Ulf Volmer wrote: Thanks for your response, which clarifies matters for me.>> I have a couple of questions that this raises.>> 1. Why exactly does backuppc want to ssh to root?> To enable access to all of the files on the client.>> Is this just a way of running BackupPC as root?> Why do you want this? It's not required to run backuppc as user root.I don't want (or not want) to do this. I was asking the reason for ssh-ing from backuppc to root. I don't recall any other application taking this route ?>> 2. The graphical interface seems to be treated as an extra, >> but what other way is there of accessing BackupPC? >> Is there a CLI approach?> There are some CLI applications available, BackupPC_tarCreate for > example to restore file from the command line.I take it then that there is no CLI method of setting up and running BackupPC ? Incidentally, I don't recall ever changing the user and group under which BackupPC is to run when setting up BackupPC under CentOS-6. Maybe this was done automatically during the CentOS installation of this program? (I certainly never used suexec explicitly.) -- Timothy Murphy gayleard /at/ eircom.net School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin
On 09/13/2015 03:48 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote:> Timothy Murphy wrote: > >> I thought I'd write a 1-page note to myself of the steps I took, >> in preparation for CentOS-8... >> I have a couple of questions that this raises. >> >> 1. Why exactly does backuppc want to ssh to root? >> Is this just a way of running BackupPC as root? >> >> 2. The graphical interface seems to be treated as an extra, >> but what other way is there of accessing BackupPC? >> Is there a CLI approach? >> If so, where is the list of transfer requests kept? > Another small query. > I see that BackupPC starts 6 copies of httpd running, > but so far only 2 have ever been used. > Can this number (6) be changed? >1. It's just the default, it can easily be configured to start rsync through sudo, you need root privileges to backup all files. 2. You can do all operations through CLI, all of it is mentioned in the documentation. http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html#Step-7:-Talking-to-BackupPC 3. As mentioned earlier, this is just the default apache config. And can be altered through httpd.conf (though I wouldn't mess too much with it, the defaults are normally fine). -kp