Thursday 3 May 2007

Local backups

The motto of a good sys admin is backup often, and backup automatically, and make sure you can recover from a disaster. In general, my practices have been sorely lacking. No copies, no RAID, no external backup other then a couple random backups and dumping the databases (from MySQL) and the directory (from OpenLDAP).

I finally just went with one of the many rsync backup script/utilties: rsnapshot. There is a article about it on www.debian-administration.org. It's simple, supports remote backups using rsync over SSH, and gives you nice rotated backups. Easy, effective, automated. What more do you want?

So now the one thing I have still to do is do an external backup. The current backup is ~17GB. As much as I'd like to burn about two dozen CDs (or even 5 DVDs) with a spanned tarball, that sounds like a pain in the ass. I guess that means an external drive which I take off-site. Ah well, a problem to solve another day.

Tuesday 1 May 2007

APT repository by SSH

So while on the www.debian-administration.org site today I noticed an article about Restricting access to your private Debian repository where amongst other gems, they mention that you can use "ssh://" URIs in your sources.list file. Pretty nice, yes?

Well on top of that, mixed in with the comments, someone points out there's a helper utility called ssh-copy-id which copies your SSH public key(s) to a specified machine. It takes care of appending your key to the existing authorized_keys file and fixing file permissions on .ssh and the authorized_keys file.

As Borat says: "Verry nasse!"

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