Oreilly O really

[James McDonald]

I presume most of us look to this list or google when we have admin 
questions. However I have found that for myself the good old fashioned 
paper book is sometimes the best way to soak up information.
 
One thing that has been annoying me is my lack of backup strategy so 
when I saw a section in an Oreilly book "Linux Server Hacks - 100 
Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools" on backup. I bought it... 20minutes 
after getting it home I had ssh public key authentication working and a 
rough script for network backup going.
 
What I did follows.
 
Firstly I had to enable public key login by running the following on the 
source box as root

    ssh-keygen -t rsa

and then copying the resulting public key to the target box, again as root

    scp .ssh/id_rsa.pub target_server:.ssh/authorized_keys2

Once the public key is installed you can test it by simply sshing to the 
box as root
 
    ssh servername
 
To get backup going I made up this script very rudimentary....

I could have chosen to make one large remote tar ball but I chose to 
split it up into
functional tars

#!/bin/sh
# filename: /home/jamesm/bin/backup

# things to backup

# mail
# apache config
# website
# home drive
# svn db

REMOTE_DIR=/mnt/hde1/backup

MYMAIL=/home/vpopmail/domains/jmcd.dyndns.org/jamesm/Maildir
tar -czvf - $MYMAIL | ssh mx1 "cat > $REMOTE_DIR/amd-jamesm-mail.tar.gz"

APACHE_CONFIG="/etc/httpd/access \
/etc/httpd/conf \
/etc/httpd/conf.d"
tar -czvf - $APACHE_CONFIG | ssh mx1 "cat > $REMOTE_DIR/amd-apache.tar.gz"

SVN=/opt/subversion
tar -czvf - $SVN | ssh mx1 "cat > $REMOTE_DIR/amd-svn.tar.gz"

MYHOME="/home/jamesm/Docs \
/home/jamesm/.ssh \
# /home/jamesm/mp3 \ probably not needed to backup mp3 or oggs every day
# /home/jamesm/ogg \
/home/jamesm/bin"
tar -czvf - $MYHOME | ssh mx1 "cat > $REMOTE_DIR/amd-myhome.tar.gz"

MYWEB=/var/www/html
tar -czvf - $MYWEB | ssh mx1 "cat > $REMOTE_DIR/amd-web.tar.gz"

you can run the above manually but it's probably easier to put it in 
root's crontab
then all that is left is to run as root

crontab -e

and add a line to get it to backup every day at 2:05 am  to call the script

05 2 * * * /home/jamesm/bin/backup