Backup Central

Greetings,

I am trying to implement the use of BackupPC in our school district. The
features of the software is quite impressive, I am having some trouble
making some things work.

First off, let me describe what BackupPC is running on: I have a Debian
Sarge i386 system running backuppc version 2.0.2 from the debian
repository. I have successfuly ran a backup of a remote machine via
Samba. Our network is a 10.10.0.0, subneted to a class B. And now the
problems I'm experiancing:

1. nmblookup - I can run nmblookup from the command line and get what
looks like the correct responce:

# nmblookup server
querying server on 10.10.255.255
10.10.10.1 server<00>

But, when I attempt to have 'server' backed up, BackupPC reports that it
could not find it. Server is staticaly assigned to 10.10.10.1. Help!

2. Our attempt to make a tar backup of a linux box doesn't complete.
According to BackupPC, the backup is in progress, but I'm not seeing any
traffic nor any change in activity on the server or the client. I can
cancel the backup. I have left the backup running for a few hours now,
still no diffrence. Help!

Any help you guys can give (FAQs, hints, full solutions, whatever) would
be great. Oh, and keep up the great work with this project! It's great!

--Matt




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2. Our attempt to make a tar backup of a linux box doesn't complete.
According to BackupPC, the backup is in progress, but I'm not seeing any
traffic nor any change in activity on the server or the client. I can
cancel the backup. I have left the backup running for a few hours now,
still no diffrence. Help!

Hello,

I had the same behaviour once (with rsync, but the ssh and rsync
processes were running on the client with no cpu load, nothing happened)
I tracked it down to an option in an ssh config file. can you log in to
the client from the backuppc account, without entering a password (the
ssh-key-exchange part in the manual)? If you do "ssh -l root client",
do you get some warning like:
Warning: No xauth data; using fake authentication data for X11 forwarding.

It seems BackupPC chokes on the warning.
in .ssh or /etc/ssh/ssh_config say
ForwardX11 no

You should be able to log in to the client machine as root without
password, and ssh should emit no warnings.

Anyway, I'm a new user too, this is only my observation...

best regards,

Oliver Freyd





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So, I did some more digging around...

I did the documentation recommended manual run of the backup as the
backuppc user, which failed looking for the IP as well.

So, I looked at the perl code. Following the code back to
/sr/share/backuppc/lib/BackupPC/Lib.pm, I found the lines where it
actualy fails in the subroutine NetBiosHostIPFind:

$nmbCmd = $bpc->cmdVarSubstitute($bpc->{Conf}{NmbLookupFindHostCmd}, $args);

foreach my $resp ( split(/[\n\r]+/, $bpc->cmdSystemOrEval($nmbCmd, undef,

$args) ) ) {

if ( $resp =~ /querying\s+\Q$host\E\s+on\s+(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)/i ) {

$subnet = $1;

$subnet = $1 if ( $subnet =~ /^(.*?)(\.255)+$/ );

} elsif ( $resp =~ /^\s*(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)\s+\Q$host/ ) {

my $ip = $1;

$firstIpAddr = $ip if ( !defined($firstIpAddr) );

$ipAddr = $ip if ( !defined($ipAddr) && $ip =~ /^\Q$subnet/ );

}

}

$ipAddr = $firstIpAddr if ( !defined($ipAddr) );


I've not done anything in perl, but I can follow the code. As far as I
can tell, the regexp looks like it should pick up the IP address
correctly. So, why does it fail?

I did want to see if nmblookup would run as the backuppc user, which I
did check... no problems there.

Perhaps theres a way I can get the exact output of the nmblookup command
when it's run by backuppc? I just can't find where this should be failing.

--Matt

Matthew Ross wrote:

1. nmblookup - I can run nmblookup from the command line and get what
looks like the correct responce:

# nmblookup server
querying server on 10.10.255.255
10.10.10.1 server<00>

But, when I attempt to have 'server' backed up, BackupPC reports that it
could not find it. Server is staticaly assigned to 10.10.10.1. Help!





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Matthew Ross writes:

So, I did some more digging around...

I did the documentation recommended manual run of the backup as the
backuppc user, which failed looking for the IP as well.

So, I looked at the perl code. Following the code back to
/sr/share/backuppc/lib/BackupPC/Lib.pm, I found the lines where it
actualy fails in the subroutine NetBiosHostIPFind:

Can you include the part of the output from BackupPC_dump -v where
it runs the command, prints the output, and prints the result of
parsing the data?

Craig

Matthew Ross writes:

Here's what I get when I run the commnds specified in your
troubleshooting section of the documentation:

# su backuppc
backuppc < at > hades:/root$ /usr/share/backuppc/bin/BackupPC_dump -v -f server
Name server doesn't know about server; trying NetBios
cmdSystemOrEval: about to system server
cmdSystemOrEval: finished: got output Exec of server failed

NetBiosHostIPFind: couldn't find IP address for host server
host not found
backuppc < at > hades:/root$

For some reason it looks like the $Conf{NmbLookupFindHostCmd}
turns just into just 'server' or ' server', instead of a command
like '/path/to/bin/nmblookup server'. As you can see, it fails
to exec the command ' server', so it never runs nmblookup.

It looks like your setting of $Conf{NmbLookupPath} is empty or
undefined. Since the default value of $Conf{NmbLookupFindHostCmd}
is '$nmbLookupPath $host' that would explain why this command
resolves to ' server'.

Craig

Yes, I discovered even machine accounts have home directories. I wasn't
sure they did, but Debian puts the backuppc users's home directory at
the /usr/share/backuppc directory. Creating a key for the backuppc user
(which _is_ explained in the documentation, I just had to read it again)
makes the keys in /usr/share/backuppc/.ssh/. All is working well now.

--Matt

Oliver Freyd wrote:

Matthew Ross wrote:

Just tried running 'ssh -l root jude "echo blah"', and it worked fine
as root. Then I tried it as the user 'backuppc'. It did the normal
"authenticy of host can't be established" feedback. After continuing,
I had to enter root's password, and then it echoed 'blah' for me.

Does the RSA key have to be setup for the user Root, or for the user
Backuppc on the server side? Could this be the problem?

Hello,

I think you got it!
You have to create that key us user 'backuppc', because the BackupPC
program is running as user backuppc, and the whole key-based
authentication works only per-user.
So create the key on the server as user 'backuppc', then copy it to the
client's root account.

Hope it works now...

greetings,
Oliver Freyd





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