Re: [cobalt-users] Rsync Setup Question

[Jim Dory <jdory@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dave's List Addy wrote:

> Read the archives, Google'd to death and read the man pages on Rsync. Maybe
> it's a little over my head here.
>
>
>
> To place this in a cron won't work like this I am thinking, I read up on the
> creation of new ssh keys, but that is where it gets fuzzy. Anyone one have a
> laymen's how-to for us remedial folks :)
>
>
>  

Maybe for once I can help someone instead of being on the recieving end. 
I am mostly confused by all this stuff but was able to get RSA 
Authentication working using these simple steps:

http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Linux/FAQs/sshrsakey.html

One caveat - depending on version of ssh or something.. this link faq 
worked on one server but on another I had to do a
ssh-keygen -t rsa

(specify -t for type). Everything else seemed to work easily..


one other thing that differed..
rather than identity.pub and identity, it saved the info as
id_rsa.pub, etc.

I think that's all. easy deal. If you specify a passphrase it seems to 
want to require that at logon... or leave it /null.

Here's a bit more from a flexbackup tut (I don't know diffs between rsa 
and dsa, but both work):

Let's assume that you want to backup some directories or filesystems 
from another host. After all, you've just paid big money for the DLT 
drive on your main host, so now you should take advantage of it and use 
it to backup your other machines. In addition, you want these backups to 
happen in the middle of the night. First, you need to set up 
password-less ssh login to the remote machine.

 1.

    As root on the machine with the tape drive, do the following
    (|local| is the machine with the tape drive; |remote| is the
    machine that you wish to backup to the local tape drive):

  # ssh-keygen -t dsa

 2.

    This will create the files |id_dsa| and |id_dsa.pub| in the .ssh
    directory. The file |id_dsa| is your private key and will remain
    on the host that has the tape drive. You will need to transfer
    |id_dsa.pub| to the remote host:

   # scp user@remote .ssh/id_dsa.pub remote:
   # ssh user@remote
   remote# su root
   remote# cat /home/user/id_dsa.pub >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2
   remote# rm /home/user/id_dsa.pub
   remote# exit

 3.

    Next, you may have to adjust your sshd_config file to permit root
    to login via ssh. While sshd_config ships with root logins
    enabled, almost all sysadmins disable this feature to enhance
    security. Edit /etc/sshd_config to so that the PermitRootLogin
    line looks like this:

    PermitRootLogin without-password

   This will only permit root to login with the private key stored on 
the local machine. This is moderately secure.
   However, you should decide whether this is an acceptable level of 
risk for your environment. The other
   (and arguably better) approach would be to set up another user who 
would login without a password and would then
   be able to sudo the necessary commands for the backup.

 4.

    Verify that you can login to the remote machine as root with no
    password:

    # ssh root@remote or ssh -l root remote

   should get you a prompt on the remote machine without requiring you 
to type a password.

--
Jim D