BackupPC on Michael’s Domain

BackupPC and Macs

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I myself have been using the backup software BackupPC for almost a decade, and I started to backup our lab computers to a central backup server about two years ago. BackupPC supports deduplication and therefore much data can be stored on a couple of 2 TB drives.BackupPC supports many protocols (smb, ftp, tar/rsync via ssh), but we mostly use rsync via ssh. The data is not encrypted before the backup. Strangely not even the upcoming version 4 will support pre-egression encryption. However, we store the backup on an encrypted volume. That way it is at least protected if the backup server is stolen. And during transit, the data is protected by ssh. However, the system is not TNO (“trust no-one”), since I (as the backupc administrator) can access the files. When using Linux, one feasible method would be to encrypt the user’s home directory using eCryptFS (which is an inbuilt option when creating users on Ubuntu ) and then backup the /home/.ecryptfs directory instead of the users home directory. However, recovery would be much more of a problem. You would be able to browse the diectory structure and files of the backup, but the filenames would be meaningless since they are also encrypted in the process.There is one peculiarity in backing up Mac OSX machines: BackupPC normally connects as root via ssh into the client computer and executes the rsync backup command. In order to make this possible on university-managed Mac OSX computers, we had to create a dedicated user (“backuppc”) on the client machines and allow for this user the execution of rsync with root privileges, which is done by adding this line in the /etc/sudoers file:backuppc ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/rsync. Then we have to change the ssh/rsync command for the Mac client on the backuppc server changing “root” into “backuppc”.

Encrypted backup using BackupPC, LVM and cryptsetup

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I do offsite backups using BackupPC. The amount of data increases constantly so I need to add occasionally hard disks. Additionally I want the data to be encrypted, at least after powering off the system that is running the BackupPC application. So I decided to use logical volume management (LVM) and block device encryption (cryptsetup). The following steps were needed (on Ubuntu Feisty):

BackupPC (and MacOS X)

Fri, 25 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

BackupPC seems to be a cool application. Except for the fact that it is not easy to start working with in the first place. I downloaded BackupPC-2.0.0.tar.gz and installed it into the directory /usr/local/backuppc. Then I executed the config.pl and answered all I could. The place where I want to backup my stuff is my second hard drive /dev/hdb5 which is formatted as reiserfs and mounted at /mnt/hdb. After the config script there was a new directory in /mnt/hdb: backuppc, which contained 6 other directories: conf, cpool, log, pc, pool and trash.BTW you cannot use a smbmount to store the backup data (at least not easily). The configure.pl script tries to chown the stuff on the smbmount and this leads to the abortion of the perl script (could be modified and the chown could be done manually by defining the correct uid and gid in the fstab). I struggled with this for a day (gave the smbmount even fmask=777,dmask=777 and the correct owner/group), but to no avail as apparently the scripts wants to execute the chown command. I probably need to solve this problem as I need to backup via the network to a Macintosh running OS X and thus need to use samba (or nfs…).I use tar over ssh to backup my client (actually server and one of the clients are in my case physically the same machine). Anyway I have to setup ssh. As I have RH9, it’s OpenSSH (ssh2).Another client is running MacOS X (10.3). Works quite well after I figured out that the tar command on MacOS X is neither in the PATH nor in its normal location, but in /usr/bin/tar. I just made a link and BackupPC worked:sudo ln -s /usr/bin/tar /bin/tar

Manually uncompressing backup files creating by BackupPC (Zzzz)

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The perl script /usr/local/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_zcat does it, but you need BackupPC installed for this purpose. There is a standalone frontend for the compression libraries available called Zzzz… made by the same guy who is behind mplayer.

Getting the web interface for BackupPC working with Apache2 under Suse 9

Fri, 20 Feb 2004 00:00:00 +0000

BackupPC has been working without me noticing it. Now I want set up the web interface.First I downloaded apach2-mod_perl and perl-Tie-IxHash (there are Suse rpms) and installed them.Directories/files that I duplicated (this is only necessary if you need to run two instances of the Apache server):cp -a /etc/apache2 /etc/apache2backuppcchmod -R 775 /var/log/apache2backuppc/cp -a /var/log/apache2 /var/log/apache2backuppcchown -R backuppc:users /var/log/apache2backuppc/ cp /var/run/httpd2.pid /var/run/httpd2backuppc.pidchmod 644 /var/run/httpd2backuppc2.pidchown backuppc:users /var/run/httpd2backuppc.pid cp -a /etc/sysconfig/apache2 /etc/sysconfig/apache2backuppcchmod 644 /etc/sysconfig/apach2backuppcchown backuppc:users /etc/sysconfig/apache2backuppccp /etc/init.d/apache2 /etc/apache2backuppcThen I edited the following files:/etc/sysconfig/apache2backuppc Change APACHE_ACCESS_LOG to a new location!!!!/etc/apache2backuppc/listen.conf Change from 80 to 8080/etc/apache2backuppc/uid.conf Change wwwrun/www to backuppc/users/etc/apache2backuppc/httpd.conf1. Change all appearances of the apache2 directories into apache2backuppc2. Change to AllowOverride Indexes AuthConfigThe following command starts up Apache2 as user backuppc and listening to the port 8080: /usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -f /etc/apache2backuppc/httpd.conf For some reason it doesn’t yet start up automatically at system boot.For the web interface running in mod_perl mode I switch off the cgi script to be executed as user backuppc:chmod u-s /srv/www/cgi-bin/BackupPC_Admin Anyway I don’t know whether apache2 supports mod_perl, because I don’t get the mod_pel listed when I query:/usr/sbin/httpd2-prefork -l But this is maybe due to the fact that I run apache2 and not apache???I insert the following into /etc/apach2backuppc/mod_info.conf:LoadModule perl_module /usr/lib/apache2/mod_perl.so PerlModule Apache2 SetHandler perl-script PerlResponseHandler ModPerl::Registry PerlOptions +ParseHeaders Options +ExecCGI Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from localhost AuthName "Backup Admin" AuthType Basic AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/conf.d/passwd Require valid-user Now I have to create a .htaccess file in the cgi-bin directory with the following contect:AuthGroupFile /etc/apache2/conf.d/group AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/conf.d/passwd AuthType basic AuthName "access" require valid-user Then I have to create the password file (use the -a flag to add a user!): /usr/sbin/htpasswd2 -c /etc/apache2/conf.d/passwd backuppc >New password: ******* >Re-type new password: ******* >Adding password for user backuppc Then I restarted. It didn’t work. So I changed to permissions of the cgi script:chmod 750 /srv/www/cgi-bin/BackupPC_Adminls -al /srv/www/cgi-bin/BackupPC_Admin should give as result rwxr-x—Now it works! At least I get the Administration web page loaded into my browser. But without the need to authenticate myself. And I cannot administer anything.So I added to /etc/apache2backuppc/default-server.conf:/srv/www/cgi-bin/BackupPC_Admin Setenv REMOTE_USER backuppc and I changed: AllowOverride None into: AllowOverride Indexes AuthConfig And I change as well: AllowOverride None into: AllowOverride Indexes AuthConfig I don’t know what of the above is really necessary. But now authentication is working and when I type into the “Host or User name” field localhost, the script at leat tries to access the correct pages, but fails with the error:Only privileged users can view information about host localhost. The reason appears to be that I have set up wrongly the hosts configuration file for backuppc (in my case located at /mnt/backup/conf/hosts. You have to give the correct users…We use an external hard drive to backup. Because we don’t want to have it switched on all the time we have to mount it every time we want to do a backup. The regular mount command:sudo mount /dev/sdc1 /media/sdc1 is sufficient. However the backup directory’s owner on sdc1 needs to be backuppc. We also have to restart the backuppc daemon, because if it starts up during boot (when the external drive is not connected), it cannot find the path to the backup directory:su /etc/init.d/suse-backuppc stop /etc/init.d/suse-backuppc start /etc/init.d/suse-backuppc reload I think the reload might not be necessary. Maybe one doesn’t have to restart at all and only reloading does the job…Then you can check whether backuppc works correctly. You have to be user backuppc to be able to so: /usr/local/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_serverMesg status info /usr/local/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_serverMesg status jobs /usr/local/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_serverMesg status hosts