Re: Trouble running rdiff-backup after Windows updates

On 01/11/2021 15:21, Michael Crider - HOEC wrote:
> We have used rdiff-backup for well over 10 years for our Linux servers 
> and workstations, and until recently to back up Windows servers and 
> workstations we mounted their drives locally on the backup server and 
> ran rdiff-backup against the mount. When our first Windows 10 
> workstations arrived with v1909, we started having trouble reliably 
> mounting the drives, so we recently put the Windows executable of 
> 2.0.5 on our Windows workstations and tried the same method we use for 
> Linux - a cron job on the backup server would ssh to the Windows 
> workstation (running the built-in OpenSSH server) and call a batch 
> file that would run rdiff-backup, sending the backup back to the 
> server. Keys were in place to allow passwordless connections. This way 
> we could schedule several workstations to run in sequence without 
> having multiples overlap in time (as might happen if we did the 
> scheduling at the workstation). That was very stable on workstations 
> running Windows 10 1909 and below. Then we upgraded all of our 
> workstations to 21H1. Now we can manually ssh to the Windows 
> workstation and run the batch file and it runs just fine. But if we 
> run the cron job script that does the ssh and runs the batch file, 
> everything works (setting environment variables and updating specific 
> local files from network masters using scp) until the rdiff-backup 
> command. We don't have "echo off" on the batch file so we can see the 
> command issued. It makes the connection to the backup server and 
> starts rdiff-backup on it, but then it hangs and doesn't progress any 
> further, and no files are updated in the backup destination. We 
> started with rdiff-backup 2.05 using SysNative in the remote-schema, 
> then moved to 2.1.0a1-64 to see if that helped (changing the 
> remote-schema to System32 but leaving everything else the same). but 
> nothing changed except for an added warning about the server not 
> understanding the API. If we are running the cron script in a terminal 
> we can press Ctrl-C and exit. If it runs from a cron schedule we have 
> to kill rdiff-backup on either the workstation or the server. Has 
> anyone else seen something similar?
>
> The command in the cron job is: ssh ${BACKUP_USER}@${TARGETHOST} 
> rdiff-backup.bat ${BACKUPTO}; RDIFF_RESULT=$?
>
> The command in the batch file is: 
> C:\rdiff-backup-2.1.0a1-64\rdiff-backup.exe -v 6 
> --exclude-symbolic-links --remote-schema 
> "C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe %%s rdiff-backup --server" 
> --include "C:/FuturaData" --include "C:/Program Files (x86)/Futura 
> Systems/FuturaGIS/Staking Client" --exclude 
> "C:/Users/%BACKUP_USER%/AppData/Local/Temp" --exclude 
> "C:/Users/%BACKUP_USER%/AppData/Local/ESRI/Local Caches" --include 
> "C:/Users/%BACKUP_USER%" --exclude "C:/**" C:/ 
> [email protected]::%BACKUPTO%
>
> Both use environment variables set on the command line of the script 
> or earlier in the script.

It may not help much, but we run from Windows machines to a Linux server 
using (a more complicated version of) the command below, which works 
fine for rdiff-backup 2.0.5 and Windows 21H1:

rdiff-backup.exe --remote-schema "\path\to\plink.exe -batch -P 22 -ssh 
-i \path\to\privatekey.ppk %s rdiff-backup --server" -v 5 
"C:/Users/ThisUser" [email protected]::archive