Tuxas home pageRsbackup helps the system administrator to set up a rsync/ssh based file system mirror for remote hosts. The package installation script takes care of tasks such as creation of accounts and transfer of DSA host keys. Although these steps could be done by hand as well, there is lots of nitty gritty work to do. By having an installation script on all systems in a network consistency can be achieved much easier. In addition, the knowledge of what needs to be done gets stored in this script in a structured way.
The package is primarily intended to be used for back up of small client systems (the rsbackup client) and sending its file system data to a host with sufficient disk space (the rsbackup server). It contains a script that collects some additional client system information which can help to restore the client from scratch later, if needed.
Idea behind this is that large hard disks are getting cheaper now, and thus these disks can be used to hold backups of other systems. This does not mean that it obsoletes other backup strategies, but at least it can ease the daily backup strategy a bit.
There are two packages: a server and a client package, for one backup server and multiple clients in a network. The server package needs to be installed on the backup server, and the client package on each client.
The client package depends on the server package, so the server should be installed first.
After successful installation, the rsbackup server contains a file system called "/backups". It is of sufficient size to hold the client data. When the super user on the server side starts "rsbackup", this essentially calls "rsync -e ssh", which establishes a secure connection to a client and logs in as user "rsbackup" on that client. For authentication the server host DSA key gets used instead of a terminal password. The client then switches to super user mode (sudo), collects some system information in "/var/rsbackup/system-config-info" and calls the rsync remote deamon via /usr/sbin/rsbackupd. Finally the clients file system gets mirrored to the server /backups area.
As it is feasible to exclude certain areas in the file system such as /tmp, rsbackup may be configured according to local clients requirements. This can be done either on the command line directly, or by a config file (/etc/rsbackup.conf; /etc/rsbackupd.conf). The config file uses XML syntax and gets created during installation process.
Configuration file parameters may be edited by hand anytime and then being validated for correctness. The other alternative is to apply the "dpkg-reconfigure" command to the package.
Debian Woody or later, as it uses debconf multiselect and a the validating perl XML parser. If a firewall is located between the client and server, it needs to be configured so that it allows ssh connections from server to client and that the client can retrieve the host key from the server using either one of ftp, pftp, http, or https protocol.
Rsbackup should not ask for a password, as account rsbackup is locked on the client. If rsbackup asks for a password, check /var/log/auth.log for the ssh error message. What usually happens is that the server host name does not get properly resolved, and the auth.log file contains the proper IP address. Find out the local host name for the IP address and modify the server name accordingly in file /var/rsbackup/.ssh/authorized_keys*.