[OpenIndiana-discuss] Root as role vs. user and rsync

[Jeppe Toustrup]

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Gary Gendel <gary at genashor.com> wrote:
> I finally decided to take the bullet and make root a role instead of a user.
>  All went well except for my nightly backup.
>
> I have a backup server that rsyncs my various collection of Linux,
> OpenIndiana, Windows, and Mac machines nightly. Without root as a user, how
> do I set up rsync to ssh onto the machine and retrieve the root system files
> on OpenIndiana?

There are two ways as I see it:

1. Start rsyncd (see
http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/rsync+daemon+service+on+OpenIndiana)
and set up a share for '/' which you then can rsync against. You can
either do this directly over the network (unencrypted) or SSH into the
machine and connect to rsyncd through localhost.
2. SSH in as dedicated unprivileged user, which then have permissions
to run rsync with root permissions though sudo. This is the option I
use for backups, and I have a line such as the following in the sudo
configuration, which only allows the unprivileged user to retrieve
files from the server, and not write files:

    backup  ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/rsync --server --sender *

--
Venlig hilsen / Kind regards
Jeppe Toustrup (aka. Tenzer)