On Wednesday 01 October 2003 14:53 pm, Richard wrote:

I'm running SuSE 8.2 Pro with Shorewall on several machines in 4 different physical locations. I want to be able to admin from one location and backup a certain directory from two separate locations to a dedicated harddrive in a third location.

They are all hooked into broadband. I have accounts with dyndns.org for each location.

I have established ssh communications between the locations. Each location has people who only know how to push a button so I need to automate the backup as much as possible. In each of two locations I have two windows boxes which will connecting to a Linux box which is the router/firewall, etc connected to the net. The windows machines contains the one directory which needs to be backed up.

I figure Samba/LinNeighborhood could be used for that. Or I can also do some sort of win ssh/sftp.

I would mount the Windows shares on the ssh/firewall machine and use rsync to 'mirror' the drives/directory to your backup machine. A simple line in the cron file would do the job.

So my question to all the gurus out there is which method would you suggest to implement the automatic backup via Internet?

My thought is to use a script to login via ssh then do an sftp of the one directory I need to backup. The script to be executed as a daily chron job.

Is this to simplistic? Is there an easier way to do it? Should I do some kind of GUI so the operators will have a way to do the backup manually?

As far as the admin is concerned I think I will setup for VNC client from my machine.

Any suggestions? And yes I have been reading all TFMs I can find on ssh. vnc, and vpn, hence my seeking sage advice. I'm sure someone else has already gone through this exercise and can tell me how to avoid the pitfalls. All answers will be considered except for those which tell me what I should do to myself.

TIA Richard

-- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + Bruce S. Marshall bmarsh@bmarsh.com Bellaire, MI 10/01/03 15:18 + +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ "You can't say civilizations don't advance . . . in every war they kill you in a new way." - Will Rogers

On Thursday 02 October 2003 12:19 am, John Andersen wrote:

On Wednesday 01 October 2003 10:53, Richard wrote:

...

I'm running SuSE 8.2 Pro with Shorewall on several machines in 4 different physical locations. I want to be able to admin from one location and backup a certain directory from two separate locations to a dedicated harddrive in a third location. The windows machines contains the one directory which needs to be backed up.

look into unison. We use it for that, and its smart enough not to re-transfer files that have not changed. Its on your suse cds, or go here http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

Thanks John and Bruce. I'm now looking into both rsync and unison. I will use the whichever is the simplest to set up and run automatically/ transparently/securely to the users. I have to remember the people using the system can barely use a computer and if something goes wrong they have to call me or some other Linux nut. Regards, Richard

Bruce Marshall wrote:

On Thursday 02 October 2003 9:35 am, Richard wrote:

I've never used unison but rsync is pretty simple. A typical command for cron would be:

rsync -auvzr -e ssh /path/to/dir/tobackup/ backupsite:/path/to/dir/backup/

where backup site is the domain/name of the computer to send the data to.

May also want to take a look at this site as well: http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/ -- GPG fingerprint = 3D45 5509 D380 26A4 523E A9D8 A66A 5F38 CA43 BB0E