[K12OSN] Emergency network backup using STAR && ssh

Les Mikesell les at futuresource.com
Fri Aug 13 17:54:54 UTC 2004


On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 09:15, Henry Burroughs wrote:
> For the moment, Coastal South Carolina (and coastal Georgia) are on
> the predicted path for Hurricane Charley.  Not knowing what strength
> it will be after hitting Tampa Bay, FL (which is where Eckerd College
> www.eckerd.edu, the college I graduated from is situated right on the
> water... it'll be covered by possibly 10 ft surges from the 110 mph
> storm), I am trying to backup some of the teacher's PCs (unfortunately
> I don't have Amanda or any other network backup software operating on
> those PCs b/c of a shortage of network filespace).  Also on that list
> is my own system, which I need to backup about 15 gigs to a remote
> tape drive (which I have backed that server up using good ole DUMP). 
> My system is running Linux, and I have STAR installed, which should be
> able to use ssh.  Otherwise, I'll have to get rsh installed and
>  configured for running DUMP.   Anyone gotten STAR operating via ssh?

Star has it's own concept of remote access using host:/device notation
and you need it's version of rmt configured on the tape host.  If
you don't already have that set up and star installed on all the
remotes, it would probably be faster to NFS export the other
boxes filesystems to your tape machine, mount them and tar them
up like they were local with star or gnutar.   Or you can do
a brute force ssh from either end tarring to stdout:
from tape host:
  ssh root at remote "cd / ; tar cf - . " |dd of=/dev/nst0
from remote:
 cd /
 tar cf - . | ssh root at tapehost dd of=/dev/nst0
(Actually I prefer to cd to the top of each filesystem separately
and add --one-file-system to the gnutar command. I think star
limits itself to one filesystem by default).

If the remotes are windows boxes and you have access to
the admin accounts you can use smbtar, something like
(untested..):
smbtar -s server -x 'C$' -u Administrator  -t /dev/nst0
the 'C$' is the hidden admin share for the C drive (do them all...)
and needs the single quote to protect the $ from shell expansion.
It should prompt for the administrator password or you can
add a -p password to the command line.  Smbtar is a shell wrapper
for smbclient so you can use smbclient directly for more interactive
access to the machine but note that the options are specified
differently.

---
  Les Mikesell
    les at futuresource.com







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