HowTo BackupPC SSH Key Authentication Setup For rsync Transfer

Overview

This page provides a reference for how to setup SSH key-based authentication for BackupPC rsync file transfer backups with NST. Additional information can be found here: BackupPC SSH Setup.

NST BackupPC Client Setup Example For SSH Key-based Authentication

The steps shown below for SSH key-based authentication assumes that the BackupPC user is set to: "backuppc" and the file transfer backup method is: "rsync". The configuration entries from the main BackupPC configuration file: "/etc/BackupPC/config.pl" are shown for these settings.

.
.
.
#
# The BackupPC user.
#
$Conf{BackupPCUser} = 'backuppc';
.
.
.
#
# What transport method to use to backup each host.  If you have
# a mixed set of WinXX and linux/unix hosts you will need to override
# this in the per-PC config.pl.
#
$Conf{XferMethod} = "rsync";
.
.
.

Step 1: Log In To The backuppc User Account

Since the backuppc user has no login capability, we will need to run the following for access to the backuppc user home directory: "/var/lib/BackupPC" as the backuppc user.

[root@nst-vm ~]# su - backuppc -s /bin/bash;

[backuppc@nst-vm ~]$ pwd;

/var/lib/BackupPC

[backuppc@nst-vm ~]$

Step 2: Generate RSA Key Pairs

Next we will generate RSA public / private key pairs in directory: "var/lib/BackupPC/.ssh".

ssh-keygen -t rsa

ssh root@10.222.222.107

ssh root@10.222.222.107 install -m 700 -d .ssh

cat id_rsa.pub | ssh root@10.222.222.107 tee -a .ssh/authorized_keys