[rdiff-backup-users] Re: Some questions/problems about using rdiff-backup to a remote system

[Chris G]

On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 02:38:16PM -0400, Sam Hart wrote:
> On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Chris G <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I am trying to use rdiff-backup to backup some files from my desktop
> >  Fedora 8 system to a remote Ubuntu server 7.10 system and have some
> >  questions regarding user(s) on the two systems.
> >
> >  On my desktop system I want to run rdiff-backup as root because I'm
> >  backing up all of /home and thus files belong to many different users.
> >  However the remote system, being Ubuntu, doesn't have a root user.
> >  Will this cause any problems?
> 
> Ubuntu does have a root user... it's jut not got a password set by
> default. If you wind up running rdiff-backup as root to backup all of
> /home, you will have to set it up so that it can authenticate across
> the systems. One way of doing this would be using tools like ssh-agent
> or ssh-copy-id (but be sure you know what you're doing here...
> arbitrarily copying keys between servers is a sure way to make it easy
> to compromise your entire network- If you're on a home/private network
> that's sufficiently firewalled off, this may not be a concern to you).
> 
Yes, OK, I can set up a root user on the Ubuntu system (in fact I just
have).  Whether it helps or not I'm not sure yet.


> rdiff-backup across distros works fine, I do it all the time (even
> across Unixes). The real problems with cross distro and cross Unix
> rdiff-backups are:
> 
> 1) You need to ensure the rdiff-backup tools installed on each system
> are compatible with eachother. This basically means they need to be
> the same version (unless this has changed recently and I didn't notice
> :-)
> 
I'm working on this, they don't match at the moment.  Hmmmm, that's a
real pain!  On Fedora the only version of rdiff-backup available seems
to be the current stable version 1.0.5. On Ubuntu 7.10 its version
1.1.14, that leaves me in a quandary, I can build a newer version on
Fedora but how do I get 1.1.14 as the current version is 1.1.15.  I
suppose I can build 1.1.15 on both but it's not very satisfactory.


> 2) User IDs will very probably mis-match. You will have to decide for
> yourself if this is a problem. In your example, it's very likely that
> the user ownerships in /home on one machine (Fedora) will not match
> users on the other machine (Ubuntu).
> 
Some do, others simply don't exist on the backup machine.

-- 
Chris Green