[BackupPC-users] Backup PC smbclient and passwords

[Matt G. <ma...@pr...>]

Hi there,

I've just installed BackupPC at my company having happily used it at 
home for some time.  In both locations it's used in a mixed OS 
environment, but at work we've decided to use SMB shares to read from 
everyone's PCs for ease-of-use reasons.  As such we have a backuppc 
domain user and this has access to everybody's C$ shares.

However, backuppc is unable to access the files via smbclient.  It gets 
a NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE.  I suspect this is due to a problem with its 
use of smbclient, or an issue with smbclient itself. (It appears others 
have a similar issue in 
http://www.mail-archive.com/bac...@li.../msg02333.html)

I'm pretty sure I have everything set up right.  I've tested this with:
% PASSWD=secret smbclient -U backuppc \\\\computer-name\\c\$
and this logs me in just fine.

This also works:
% PASSWD=secret smbclient \\\\matt-pc\\C\$ -U backuppc -E -N -d 1 -c 
tarmode\ full -Tc -
(filling up the terminal with gibberish from the tar file).

However, things start to go wrong at:
% PASSWD=secret smbclient \\\\matt-pc\\C\$ -U backuppc -E -N -d 1 -c 
tarmode\ full -Tc - /path_to_backup

At this point I get the NT_STATUS_LOGON_FAILURE.  This leads me to 
suspect that smbclient is using the backup paths "/path_to_backup" as 
the password.  Indeed, if I add the password at this point in the 
command-line, it logs in fine. After reading the man pages a bit, I 
tried putting "" as the password at this point ie:
% PASSWD=secret smbclient \\\\matt-pc\\C\$ -U backuppc "" -E -N -d 1 -c 
tarmode\ full -Tc - /path_to_backup

but this still fails to log in.  So, short of hardcoding the password 
into the smbclient execution string itself (I'd rather not!), is there 
any way around this issue?

I'm using BackupPC v3.0.0 and smbclient 3.0.23c-2.el5.2 (from Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux 5).

Many thanks in advance for any clues on this - I've tried googling and 
searching the mailing lists, but I wasn't ever able to find a final 
solution to this issue.

Regards,

Matt
-- 
/Matt Godbolt
ProFactor Software

/