[BackupPC-users] Install notes & comment request for Rsyncd, SSH Tunnel, WinXP

[Chris F. <cfinley@u.washington.edu>]

Greetings & salutations,

I just (mostly) installed BackupPC on Debian to backup our Windows XP 
Pro workstations. We have some Linux workstations/servers too, so 
BackupPC makes a great solution.
The Debian server uses SSH keys to access each WinXP client (sshd is 
running with cygrunsrv).
Running rsync directly from the Debian over SSH failed - this seems to 
be a cygwin or rsync bug.
However, I could run rsyncd in deamon mode (again cygrunsrv) without any 
problems. Rsyncd listens to localhost on the WinXP client while BackupPC 
uses an SSH tunnel. This part was a little tricky:
I set $Conf{ClientNameAlias} = 'localhost' in the master config file.

Each host specific config file contains:

----------------------------------------
# Establish the SSH Tunnel with port forwarding
# Note: Each client should have it's own local port so that multiple 
backups do not interfere
system('/usr/bin/ssh', '-f', '-L', '5005:localhost:873', 
'wsuser@winxpclient01', 'sleep', '30');
$Conf{RsyncdClientPort} = 5005;

----------------------------------------

It is nice that these are Perl files :) Originally, I tried to use 
$Conf{DumpPreUserCmd}, but it is VERY good about waiting for the ssh 
sleep command to finish - which closes my tunnel.
I feel safe enough to allow direct restores and I'm happy that I did not 
need to enable file sharing on the workstations.

Current issues:
1. The ping always checks localhost so there are a lot of failed backup 
reports when the client is not really there.
2. rysncd runs as the user SYSTEM. It also restores that way, so the 
users cannot access their restored files. Is there a way to backup the 
XP owner/permissions? Each user could have a different filename, so 
management would be a real pain if I have to run the service as the user.

Your comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.