David Trebacz Blog

My daughter got a MacBook Pro for college. She studying journalism and photography at Drake University and a Apple computer was heavily suggested for the magazine curriculum. So we dutifully went out and got a cool MacBook Pro. A big change for us since all of our machines are currently run Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu Linux. When she came home over Thanksgiving break, I decided to set up backuppc to also back up her local files when she was at home. Using backuppc it's nicely transparent to everyone involved. For me it's one central server that backs up all of our PC's and just one place I need to manage storage (I just added a 3TB drive to the mirror array ). Should be pretty simple, since it's all linux underneath. Essentially the process was: Exchange public SSH keys between the two machines (MacBookPro and backuppc server) and enabled SSH on the MacBook. Took me almost as much time to figure how to fire up a terminal session.  http://gerwick.ucsd.edu/...

BackupPC giving error all of a sudden. full backup started for directory cDrive (baseline backup #0) Read EOF: Connection reset by peer Tried again: got 0 bytes Error connecting to rsync daemon at 192.168.0.199:873: unexpected response Got fatal error during xfer (unexpected response) Backup aborted (unexpected response) Not saving this as a partial backup since it has fewer files than the prior one (got 0 and 0 files versus 0) Turns out the problem seems to be an update of Avast antivirus has now decided to (quietly) block connections on port 873 on my Windows XP machine. If I disable antivirus protection the backup happens wonderfully. Of course then the machine isn't protected by my anti-virus. After digging into it deeper it seems that the offending Avast tool is the "behavior shield". By going into the Behavior Shield>Expert Settings>Trusted Processes>Browse>Add and adding rsync.exe and cygrunsrv.exe. Now Avast n...

I've been successfully backing up several machines on my network with BackupPC ( Version 3.2.1). After a recent update to Kubuntu from 11.10 to 12.04 (AMD-64-bit), I'm now getting a the error message from three of my Windows boxes (2000, XP, and 7). Googling the error message did not give me any clues to why the error all of a sudden started showing up. I'm pretty sure there was an update to Samba moving from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 (to version 3.6.3). In checking with other resources on the internet it would seem, that the problem stems from an update to samba that has some incompatibilities with BackupPC: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=753531 or http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=653207 Hopefully there is a better fix than reverting sanmba versions back to 3.5.11-71, since I'm not sure what other issues that may cause on my ubuntu based system. Here are a couple excerpts from the logs that show how it was working, but has ...

I wanted to backup a couple new Windows 7 Home Premium PC's on my local home network using my current installation of BackupPC  on Ubuntu . I have a mix of linux and Windows PC's on my network. I have enjoyed using BackupPC as my central backup system for all of our PC's (8 at last count) in our house. I have used RSYNCD , but find the configuration of SMB, just a lot easier. For my home network, I'm not really concerned about SSH secure communication on my firewalled home network for my backups. In order to set it up I needed to create a users account on the machine. I have used a special backuppc user on each machine that is backed up. I set up each backuppc user as an administrator. In the past I set the accounts up without user logins and only backup administrator rights. It would appear that Microsoft has crippled the ability to manage user accounts and groups in Windows 7 Home Premium edition. I was able to get my BackupPC to be able ...

I decided it was time to get all my machines on the same backup solution. I've been using  Backuppc  for quite awhile for my Windows boxes, but have been slower to move my Linux machines over. I really was challenged when I tried to backup my smoothwall firewall for my home network How difficult could it be. It's on a linux based operating system. At first I had issues with tar exited with error 65280 () status . All my troubleshooting seemed to point to a permissions error. Ultimately, the process below would have saved me a lot of troubleshooting and on the job learning. 1. Setup SSH public credentials between both machines (see http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/ssh.html  OpenSSH section), so the user that BackupPC runs under can get the proper credentials to connect to the Smoothwall server, without physically typing in a password. 2. Modify the client transfer configuration for the non-standard tar location and SSH port...

I just noticed that the majority of the machines on my home network started failing with "No Ping Response" back in November. My storage is pretty redundant for most of my network so it took me some time to get around to figuring out the issue. In my case the machine have been faithfully backed up by a linux machine running BackupPC ( http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ ) going on several years. On November 23rd (between 10 pm and midnight) that all changed. All of my DHCP Windows machines failed with the "no ping response". I knew the machines were up, but why was BackupPC not seeing them -or at least reporting a ping failure. Turns out this was all caused by a change I had made to my Smoothwall 3.0 firewall . I had removed the Services > Static DNS entries from Smoothwall doing some routine maintenance -I think. I mean why would you have static DNS entries for machines that have their IP addresses dynamically assigned. Ultimately, I found a solution to keep my...

My upgrade to 9.10 Karmic Koala was less than smooth. Some of it may have to do with the machine being upgraded many times (starting with Hardy Heron -I think) and some of it may be due to running on PPA repositories during the last release to get the benefits of a of KDE 4.3.2 and upgrade Kopete and Digikam. The initial instalation failed leaving the machine at a command prompt. I then ran sudo dpkg --configure -a The only complaint was about my Apache configuration file. I decided to merge it and move merrily on. I rebooted, and everything seemed fine. That is until I realized that BackupPC (a backup solution I really like), wasn't running and neither was Apache. sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start started Apache running. Apache started without any complaints, but BackupPC wasn't running. sudo /etc/init.d/backuppc start Everything was running as planned. Unfortunately on restart Apache started, but BackupPC didn't. I assumed it was something hosed in the init.d ...

Over the weekend I decided to update the storage on my Kubuntu (9.04) 64 bit machine running running KDE 4.3.2. I was beginning to run out of space for backups using BackupPC. I've used it for over a year to keep versioned disk copies of all my machines (Windows 2000, Windows XP, kubuntu, and Ubuntu server). I added a 1TB Samsung energy efficient drive ( SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD103SI 1TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive ) from NewEgg for $80 with free shipping. I then got a ton of useful information on redirecting where BackupPC stores it's backup file pool from this article ( moving the BackupPC pool to a new hardrive ). I installed, formatted, mounted the new drive as /media/1TB and created a directory called /media/1TB/backuppc. I used the process: stopping BackupPC (sudo /etc/init.d/backuppc stop) copying the backup pool (sudo cp -dpR /var/lib/backuppc/. /media/1TB/backuppc/) renaming the current pool (sudo mv /var/lib/backuppc/ /v...