Re: Central Backup Server

On Fri, 2005-01-07 at 13:11 +0000, Richard Hall wrote:
> I see in the howto it mentions a central backup server having the 
> backups done on each host and pushed up to the server.    I would
> like 
> to set up my system to have a central backup server on my most
> trusted 
> network and have it pull backups from the other servers on the same
> and 
> less trusted networks.    Since the ssh connections can only be 
> initialized from the trusted network to the less trusted network and
> not 
> the other way round, the backups must be pulled by the central server 
> rather than pushed from the clients.   I would also like the central 
> server to have the ssh key/keys to the clients rather than each
> client 
> having a key to the server.   Is this configuration possible?

It would be a nice enhancement to hdup to allow server-initiated
backups, but isn't currently supported AFAIK.  I don't think it would be
that hard to implement.

One workaround would be to have hdup run locally on the clients, then
have the central server pull copies of the completed backup files.  The
tars can then be deleted from the client machines (but leave the
etc/inclist* files in place so hdup will do the right thing the next
day).  This does require having enough disk space on the client to store
a single full backup.

You probably could also work out a scheme whereby the server opens an
ssh connection to the client with some port-forwarding tunnels that
allow the client enough access to either mount a server-side directory
for its backups, or through which it could invoke an ssh or rsh
connection for hdup's remote protocol.  I haven't tried to think through
all the details here, though.

Bng

-- 
Boris Goldowsky <boris-FrUbXkNCsVf2fBVCVOL8/[email protected]>