BackupPC Notes

BackupPC Docs

• BackupPC manual
• BackupPC wiki

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

1. 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??