Re: [rdiff-backup-users] rdiff-backup logging in through sshd several times

[Maarten Bezemer]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2012, weloki wrote:

> Perhaps the specifics of what I'm doing would give clues...
> I set up a regular user's account for rdiff-backup on my backup server as
> well as a directory where I save the backed up files to. That directory has
> permissions for only rdiff-backup user and group (chmod -R
> rdiff-backup:rdiff-backup /dirname).

I assume you used chown, and not chmod?

> On the servers that I want to be backed
> up I also created a user account for rdiff-backup, and in addition to the
> entry in /etc/sudoers, in the file at
> /rdiff-backup_home/.ssh/authorized_keys I put this on one line:
>
> command="sudo rdiff-backup --server --restrict-read-only
> /",from="backup_server_IP_address",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-pty
> ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1<...long SSH public key here...> ==
> address@hidden
>
> So would each command rdiff-backup issues on the remote hosts require a
> separate SSH login session?

I use a restricted key in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys for this, not a 
normal user account, but that shouldn't make much of a difference.

As far as I know, only one ssh connection is made for each run of 
rdiff-backup. In fact, I tried fiddling around with firewall settings and 
the only thing I can get out of it, is rdiff-backup throwing exceptions 
when the ssh link breaks. It doesn't restart the ssh link.

So, if you see numerous ssh connections from backup host to primary 
server, that has to be either because you run rdiff-backup multiple times 
(for example, in a script using a for loop?) or some other process is 
trying to log into the primary server from the backup host.


HTH,
Maarten