Backup Central

I'm seeing backups to a remote host fail from the GUI backup due to
error: "no ping response". What is odd is that the same or equivalent
ping command _appears_ to work from the server command line.

Setup:
BackupPC v. 3.2.1, on an up to date Scientific Linux 6.1, installed via
yum from EPEL repo. All Linux machines; backed up via ssh, sudo to run
rsync. All machines running SELinux in "permissive" mode. Backuppc
user on server does not have a shell.

Remote site, accessed via dynamic dns, has only two machines both of
which need backups. SSH port forwarded to remote machine A. A second
ssh key installed on machine A for backuppc user to ssh to machine B
(without password) so as to "bypass" the need for agent forwarding (as I
could not start backuppc as the backuppc user thus preventing passing on
ssh-agent credentials, AFAIK).

What Works:
Backups of local and remote Machine A.

Remote command execution on machine A by backuppc user - so executing
"ssh -t -t <remotesite> 'ssh <machineB>'" logs backuppc user into
machine B from backup server command line.

Remote ping to remote machine B works from server command line - "ssh
<remotesite> '/bin/ping -c 1 -w 3 <machineB>'" returns a seemingly valid
ping from machine B.


What Does Not Work:
Ping to remote machine B works from GUI as part of a manual backup does
not work. The backup fails with the error: "no ping response".

What I Tried:
I researched via Google of course; the BackupPC manual. I also tried
via the GUI a number of different combinations for the ping command that
were equivalent to the command line command that works.


If anyone can point me in the right direction please let me know what
that might be. And yes, I know that a VPN is probably the way to go but
unfortunately, that is not the highest priority ATM. Please let me know
what / if other details are relevant. Thank you for your time.

Eric Chowanski


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I'm seeing backups to a remote host fail from the GUI backup due to
error: "no ping response". What is odd is that the same or equivalent
ping command _appears_ to work from the server command line.

Funnily enough, I saw this behavior recently in my own installation.

Not that I'm able to explain it, but simply restarting the BackupPC
service cleared it right up.

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On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 4:00 PM, Eric Chowanski <eric < at > wwek.org> wrote:

What Does Not Work:
Ping to remote machine B works from GUI as part of a manual backup does
not work.  The backup fails with the error: "no ping response".

What I Tried:
I researched via Google of course; the BackupPC manual.  I also tried
via the GUI a number of different combinations for the ping command that
were equivalent to the command line command that works.


If anyone can point me in the right direction please let me know what
that might be.  And yes, I know that a VPN is probably the way to go but
unfortunately, that is not the highest priority ATM.  Please let me know
what / if other details are relevant.  Thank you for your time.

The quick fix would be to change the ping command for that target to
something that always succeeds. The down side is that you will then
have a longer timeout if the ssh connection attempt actually fails.

--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell < at > gmail.com

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If you mean the time out I've changed it to 10000, which AFAIK means ten
seconds. And as you'll see below, I see results on the command line in
about 1 second, so an order of magnitude larger should get the job done
if that's the issue. But perhaps that's not what you meant.

I've tried the following:

What Works:
from server command line:
ssh <remoteA> "ping -c 1 -w 3 <remoteB>"
This works with both full paths the command only. It also works with
the "-w" set to 3 or 10. I'm seeing pings returned from B to A in a a
few tens of ms and from remote A back to my terminal in about a second
(over Internet).

What Does Not Work:
from GUI:
ssh <remoteA> "ping -c 1 -w 10 <remoteB>"
$sshPath <remoteA> "ping -c 1 -w 10 <remoteB>"
$sshPath $host "ping -c 1 -w 10 <remoteB>"

I've also run the above with PingMaxMsec with 500, 1000, 2500, and 10000
and not found any change in the error.

So if you or anyone has any idea what to change to make it always
succeed, I'd sure love to know what that is.


One extra note is that this host config uses a ClientNameAlias as it
needs to first ssh to 'remote A'. This seems most logical to me as I
can then leave the $hosts variable and simply override selected
commands. However, I don't believe this should be the issue since I'm
still seeing failures when the ping command uses full paths rather than
variables.

Additionally, I don't see any more indepth debugging info even with
XferLogLevel set to 5. Thoughts?

Eric


On Thu, 2011-11-03 at 16:59 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 4:00 PM, Eric Chowanski <eric < at > wwek.org> wrote:

What Does Not Work:
Ping to remote machine B works from GUI as part of a manual backup does
not work. The backup fails with the error: "no ping response".

What I Tried:
I researched via Google of course; the BackupPC manual. I also tried
via the GUI a number of different combinations for the ping command that
were equivalent to the command line command that works.


If anyone can point me in the right direction please let me know what
that might be. And yes, I know that a VPN is probably the way to go but
unfortunately, that is not the highest priority ATM. Please let me know
what / if other details are relevant. Thank you for your time.

The quick fix would be to change the ping command for that target to
something that always succeeds. The down side is that you will then
have a longer timeout if the ssh connection attempt actually fails.




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Thank you for responding. This did not work for me.

I restarted both Apache and backuppc and pings still fail.

On Thu, 2011-11-03 at 16:51 -0500, Michael Stowe wrote:
I'm seeing backups to a remote host fail from the GUI backup due to
error: "no ping response". What is odd is that the same or equivalent
ping command _appears_ to work from the server command line.

Funnily enough, I saw this behavior recently in my own installation.

Not that I'm able to explain it, but simply restarting the BackupPC
service cleared it right up.

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List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users
Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net
Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/




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On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 7:54 PM, Eric Chowanski <eric < at > wwek.org> wrote:
If you mean the time out I've changed it to 10000, which AFAIK means ten
seconds.  And as you'll see below, I see results on the command line in
about 1 second, so an order of magnitude larger should get the job done
if that's the issue.  But perhaps that's not what you meant.

No, see $conf{PingPath} in the docs. If you use something that always
succeeds like /bin/echo, it won't matter if a ping works or not.

--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell < at > gmail.com

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Yup, got it; thank you; problem solved.

However, my solution was to set $conf{PingCmd} in the host config to
"/bin/echo" because $conf{PingPath} looks to me to be a global only and
I would like to keep pings for local machines. But this does solve the
ping problem so far. Thank you for the solution.

Any thoughts if this is considered normal or should his indicate some
area of the system that's buggy? I ask only because as I found, the
commands succeed on the command line but fail from the GUI and the using
"/bin/echo" strikes me more as 'work around' than actual explanation for
the behavior. I am happy to do more testing if that's the case if more
knowledgeable folk can suggest any helpful directions.

Thanks again,
Eric


On Thu, 2011-11-03 at 20:33 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 7:54 PM, Eric Chowanski <eric < at > wwek.org> wrote:
If you mean the time out I've changed it to 10000, which AFAIK means ten
seconds. And as you'll see below, I see results on the command line in
about 1 second, so an order of magnitude larger should get the job done
if that's the issue. But perhaps that's not what you meant.

No, see $conf{PingPath} in the docs. If you use something that always
succeeds like /bin/echo, it won't matter if a ping works or not.




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On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 2:50 AM, Eric Chowanski <eric < at > wwek.org> wrote:

However, my solution was to set $conf{PingCmd} in the host config to
"/bin/echo" because $conf{PingPath} looks to me to be a global only and
I would like to keep pings for local machines.  But this does solve the
ping problem so far.  Thank you for the solution.

Any thoughts if this is considered normal or should his indicate some
area of the system that's buggy?  I ask only because as I found, the
commands succeed on the command line but fail from the GUI and the using
"/bin/echo" strikes me more as 'work around' than actual explanation for
the behavior.  I am happy to do more testing if that's the case if more
knowledgeable folk can suggest any helpful directions.

Not quite sure why the return status from your ssh'd ping command
isn't getting back, but openvpn is easy to set up and I'd recommend
using it instead of fighting with ssh issues.

--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell < at > gmail.com

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Thanks for the time. You are so correct with OpenVPN.

Eric


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