Remote backups via rsync between RHEL 5.3 and Mac OS X 10.5.7 LeopardEdit
I first set up remote backups between RHEL (specifically, RHEL 3) and Mac OS X back in 2006 (Tiger, if I recall correctly), and detailed that process in "Remote backups via rsync between RHEL 3 and Mac OS X".
These notes refer to my experiences in 2009, this time with RHEL 5.3 and Mac OS X 10.5.7 Leopard.
Objective
Our objective is to connect from our client machine (Mac OS X) via SSH to perform an rsync backup of critical files on a remote Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine.
Initial client-side setup
First of all let’s see what version of rsync we have on the client side (Mac OS X 10.5.7 Leopard:
$ whereis rsync
/usr/bin/rsync
$ rsync --version
rsync version 2.6.9 protocol version 29
Copyright (C) 1996-2006 by Andrew Tridgell, Wayne Davison, and others.
<http://rsync.samba.org/>
Capabilities: 64-bit files, socketpairs, hard links, symlinks, batchfiles,
inplace, IPv6, 32-bit system inums, 64-bit internal inums
rsync comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you
are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. See the GNU
General Public Licence for details.
Initial server-side setup
How does this compare with what’s available on the server (RHEL 5.3)?
# yum list rsync
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin
Excluding Packages in global exclude list
Finished
Available Packages
rsync.i386 2.6.8-3.1 rhel-i386-server-5
I know from my experience last time ("Remote backups via rsync between RHEL 3 and Mac OS X") that version 2.6.8 must also speak "protocol version 29", so let’s try installing that:
# yum install rsync
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin
Excluding Packages in global exclude list
Finished
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package rsync.i386 0:2.6.8-3.1 set to be updated
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
Dependencies Resolved
=====================================================================================================================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
=====================================================================================================================================
Installing:
rsync i386 2.6.8-3.1 rhel-i386-server-5 229 k
Transaction Summary
=====================================================================================================================================
Install 1 Package(s)
Update 0 Package(s)
Remove 0 Package(s)
Total download size: 229 k
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
rsync-2.6.8-3.1.i386.rpm | 229 kB 00:00
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing : rsync [1/1]
Installed: rsync.i386 0:2.6.8-3.1
Complete!
# rsync --version
rsync version 2.6.8 protocol version 29
Copyright (C) 1996-2006 by Andrew Tridgell, Wayne Davison, and others.
<http://rsync.samba.org/>
Capabilities: 64-bit files, socketpairs, hard links, ACLs, xattrs, symlinks, batchfiles,
inplace, IPv6, 64-bit system inums, 64-bit internal inums
rsync comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you
are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. See the GNU
General Public Licence for details.
Key set-up
I’ll be using the key pair that I generated last time, so there is no need to do anything on the client side.
On the server side I’m going to add my public key to root’s authorized_keys file. First, upload the public key file from the local client to the server:
$ scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa_rsync.pub remoteuser@example.com:/home/remoteuser/.ssh
Back on the server, append this to the authorized_keys file for root:
# sudo cat /home/remoteuser/id_dsa_rsync.pub >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys
And we customize the authorized_keys file by prepending this to the line in the file which corresponds to the key that we just added:
command="rsync --server --daemon .",no-port-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-pty
Testing the connection
Seeing as I’m running Bansshee I could get temporarily locked out of the server if I make too many failed connection attempts while testing, so I am going to turn it off temporarily:
# service bansshee stop
Stopping banshee: [ OK ]
Now let’s create a test directory and run some trials:
$ cd /tmp
mkdir rsync-test
$ rsync -e "ssh -i /Users/testuser/.ssh/id_dsa_rsync" -avzxn --numeric-ids --delete --progress root@example.com:/ /tmp/rsync-test
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-35.2/rsync/io.c(452) [receiver=2.6.9]
Find out if any extraneous output is causing problems:
$ ssh root@example.com echo -n 2>/dev/null > out.dat
$ cat out.dat
Try a simpler test case:
$ rsync -e ssh -avzxn --numeric-ids --delete --progress non-root-user@example.com:/ /tmp/rsync-test
receiving file list ...
rsync: opendir "/package/admin/clear/supervise" failed: Permission denied (13)
...
sent 55244 bytes received 267877 bytes 34012.74 bytes/sec
total size is 238451640 speedup is 737.96
rsync error: some files could not be transferred (code 23) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-35.2/rsync/main.c(1400) [generator=2.6.9]
Create /root/debug.sh:
#!/bin/sh
echo "$SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND" > /tmp/debug.out
And stick that in the forced command specification of the authorized_keys file before trying the rsync invocation again. Now inspect the output of /tmp/debug.out:
# cat /tmp/debug.out
rsync --server --sender -vnlogDtprxz --numeric-ids . /
So this is identical to the output that I saw back in 2006. Update the forced command specification accordingly and try again.
It works. Note that my first test run, still using the -n switch, produced this:
receiving file list ...
9778 files to consider
./
Invalid checksum length -1610612736 [sender]
rsync error: protocol incompatibility (code 2) at io.c(958) [sender=2.6.8]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (223620 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-35.2/rsync/io.c(452) [receiver=2.6.9]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (223614 bytes received so far) [generator]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-35.2/rsync/io.c(452) [generator=2.6.9]
Which basically was the exact same problem we saw in 2006.
But removing the -n switch we instead get:
receiving file list ...
9778 files to consider
./
.autofsck
0 100% 0.00kB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=9776/9778)
.mysql_history
102 100% 99.61kB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2, to-check=9775/9778)
.rnd
1024 100% 1000.00kB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#3, to-check=9774/9778)
.elinks/
...
selinux/
srv/
sys/
tmp/
usr/
var/
sent 175536 bytes received 125732394 bytes 433418.00 bytes/sec
total size is 315390998 speedup is 2.50
Scripting the backup
So our manual test run worked, all that remains is to whip up a script to automate it a little.
Clean up
Turn Bansshee back on:
# service bansshee start
Starting banshee: [ OK ]