backuppc questions.

[Scott Henson]

Michael Richter wrote:

>     > I've installed it.  It showed no errors.  But it doesn't do
>     anything.  I've
>     > done the /etc/inet.d/backuppc start (or restart) command and it
>     says
>     > everything is working.  And it doesn't do anything.
>
>     You didn't say whether you set up the hosts and client files... until
>     you create those, it does nothing. (You have to specify what clients
>     get backed up and by what mechanism.) 
>
>
> The problem is that there's nothing  to set this up with: the web
> functionality is absent.  I go to the port 8080  specified in the
> documents and ... connection is refused.  I run nmap and it says
> nothing's there.  So how do I administer this without the
> administration interface?
>
>     You might try looking at the "upstream" documentation:
>
>     http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html
>
>
> I did.  I got this gibberish from it:
> http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html#step_7__talking_to_backuppc
>
Its basically mixing in technical jargon into a place that it doesn't
need to be.  Now I have never used bacuppc, but what I get from that is
your supposed to run one of the following commands.

BackupPC_serverMesg status info
BackupPC_serverMesg status jobs
BackupPC_serverMesg status hosts

When you run these commands aparently your supposed to get some cryptic
looking mess but no errors should be printed. 


> That's documentation following the "infinite monkeys" model -- only
> they don't have the budget for infinite numbers of monkeys nor
> typewriters.
>
lol.

> The problem is that... the system isn't talking.  It's not hanging on
> any port and it is, as a result, not configurable.  Unless there's
> more of the typical Magic Incantations<tm> that I'm missing.

Yeah, the docs are kinda cryptic/obtuse. 

Please allow me comment on your use of backuppc for a moment.  I don't
know that backuppc is what your looking for.  Unless your backing up a
bunch of computers, I doubt that its going to be worth setting this
program up.  If you are only backing up one(maybe at most 5) computers I
would suggest  backupninja and a usb hard drive.  I would further
suggest using the rdiff-backup backend for everyday use and cd-r backend
for weekly or monthly use.  If your really paranoid you can use
duplicity(instead of rdiff-backup), to encrypt your backups. 
Backupninja is pretty easy to use and from what I remember its
documentation is very straight forward and easy to use for most common
cases(including backing up of major services like subversion and db
servers).

Even if your backing up for multiple computers you can use ssh and
passwordless ssh-keys to backup to a central server.  Its pretty
flexible in that regard.