Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Status of native Windows port?

[Andrew Ferguson]

Adding support for paramiko is certainly quite interesting. I wouldn't  
refuse a patch to support it on principle.

Personally, I found installing putty and the SSH corporation's windows  
binaries very straight-forward, and with the new Wiki entry and  
Windows README file, I think the process of setting up remote  
operations with rdiff-backup on Windows should now be fairly well  
documented and possible to replicate (including the SSH setup part).

Relying on an external SSH certainly gives us several big advantages:  
well tested, trusted, all configuration options are available, etc. If  
we integrated Paramiko, rdiff-backup would be responsible for  
replicating a pretty large chunk of code which we can currently call  
out to and rely on to 'just work'...

Also, integrating Paramiko would give us the first dependency which is  
under active development. The EA and ACL libraries have very few  
updates.

I suppose all of this is an argument for adding Paramiko support  
alongside the regular SSH support.

So, yes, if anyone wants to write a patch to support Paramiko, go for  
it! Just don't break the existing SSH setup. :-)



Andrew


On Aug 18, 2008, at 10:55 PM, Josh Nisly wrote:

> Looking at this makes me remember something else that I've been  
> meaning to mention on the list.
>
> Andrew, if we want rdiff-backup to be used on Windows, I think we  
> are going to have to build ssh capabilities into rdiff-backup. On  
> unix, ssh is usually installed by default, and if it isn't, the  
> package manager can take care of dependencies. This is not the case  
> on Windows. Fred Gansevles mentioned some time ago using paramiko to  
> provide a built-in ssh with rdiff-backup. I initially resisted the  
> idea, because of the complexities of public keys, etc. But I now  
> think that it is necessary. I don't think it is ideal to expect  
> everyone to install putty, especially since it behaves in ways that  
> break rdiff-backup (i.e. outputting the password prompt to stdout  
> instead of stderr). Note that I'm not suggesting that we add this  
> for unix - openssh already provides an excellent ssh transport, and  
> I see no need to replace it.
>
> Linking in paramiko and its dependency pycrypto will add about about  
> 1-3MB to the executable. This is unfortunate, but I think it would  
> be worth it.
>
> If people are interested, I can submit a patch to add support for  
> this. Andrew, what do you think?
>
> Thanks,
> JoshN
>
> ahd71 wrote:
> > I finally found out how to use the new binary with a remote linux  
> > host and documented it in http://wiki.rdiff-backup.org/wiki/index.php/BackupFromWindowsToLinux
>
>
>
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Andrew Ferguson
OIT Software Support
Tel: (609) 258-7113