Difference between revisions of "BackupPC Notes"

Revision as of 23:47, 7 October 2009

BackupPC Docs

Web Interface

The webpage that hold status messages for BackupPC is http://192.168.40.196/backuppc/ The address will change as the system goes live.

Adding a client for rsync

Install cygwin w/ rsync on the client with the following packages
1. admin - cygrunsrv
2. net - rsync
3. net - openssl
4. utils - bzip2

Config Files

Most of the configuration for BackupPC is in /etc/backuppc/config.pl Many of the options can be over-ridden with host-specific files, but the config.pl should be edited to give a good default for Windows machines. Most importantly $Conf{BackupFilesExclude} or $Conf{RsyncArgs} need to be configured to exclude the followng items:

Windows clients
- hiberfil.sys holds RAM contents during hibernation
- Temporary Internet Files IE cache
- Firefox Internet Cache
- RECYCLER Recyle Bin
- pagefile.sys Swap file
- System Volume Information System Restore files
- NTUSER.DAT Can cause problems with being in use??
- TEMP
Linux clients
- /temp
- /dev
- /proc
- /sys
- /mnt
- /media Ubuntu mounts for removable media
- Firefox internet cache
- Other caches??
- Parts of /var??

Backup Method

rsync directly over ssh was rejected because of incompatibilities with rsync daemons launched via the ssh process. Instead the preferred method is rsync connected to a persistent rsyncd through an ssh tunnel. This tunnel can either be set up to the machine directly, or through an intermediary such at the IAC nat firewall box. ssh authentication is taken care of through authorized_keys and rsync authentication uses a password that is randomly generated when the client is first set up for backups.

Operating system specific configuration parameters (such as excluded files) are handled in separate files (such as /etc/BackupPC/baseXP.pl) included from host files.

Storage Setup on Vienna

Vienna has 8x500GB drives set up with an XFS filesystem on LVM over Linux md RAID6. The device is mounted to /data and has 2.8TB of usable space. The RAID6 configuration allows up to 2 drives to fail without loss of data, and the LVM allows the filesystem to be expanded as new drives are added in the future.

Things we need to think about

ssh authentication method (authorized_keys, host-based authentication)
Open files (Outlook)
Thousands of small files can take very long to index (Pulse Recording can accumulate >60k)
Finding dhcp hosts reliably
checksum seeding
Parity Archive
Database dumps from MySQL on webserver
User notification policy??

@@ Line 35: / Line 35: @@
 ==Backup Method==
-Unless testing shows otherwise, the preferred method is rsync-over-ssh. This requires a minimal ssh and rsync install on the clients (probably a stripped-down cygwin). It has the advantage of being compressible and fully encrypted over the wire, and only transferring the changed parts of files. The downside is a higher CPU load on the server and clients for encryption and compression. For Linux hosts we should use a backuppc user and sudo privileges to avoid possible root-level compromises.
+rsync directly over ssh was rejected because of incompatibilities with rsync daemons launched via the ssh process. Instead the preferred method is rsync connected to a persistent rsyncd through an ssh tunnel. This tunnel can either be set up to the machine directly, or through an intermediary such at the IAC nat firewall box. ssh authentication is taken care of through authorized_keys and rsync authentication uses a password that is randomly generated when the client is first set up for backups.
+Operating system specific configuration parameters (such as excluded files) are handled in separate files (such as /etc/BackupPC/baseXP.pl) included from host files.
 ==Storage Setup on Vienna==