[BackupPC-users] Misleading error message

[Paul L. <pa...@zi...>]

Hi Craig,

Sometimes we like to comment out a host in the hosts file to temporarily
disable backups for the given host.  In this scenario (e.g. a
$topDir/pc/<host> folder exists, but the host is not defined in $Hosts),
attempting to browse to this host from the CGI interface causes an 'Only
privileged users can view...' error message.  Instead, it might make
more sense if there were a message such as "Host ${EscapeHTML($host)} is
not enabled in the hosts file":

sub Action_HostInfo
{
...
    if ( $host =~ /\.\./ || !-d "$TopDir/pc/$host" ) {
        ...
    } elsif ( !defined($Hosts->{$host}) && -d "$TopDir/pc/$host" ) {
        CheckPermission();
        ErrorExit("Host ${EscapeHTML($host)} is not enabled in the hosts
file");
    }
...
}

I suppose an alternative to commenting the host out of the hosts file
would be to place a config.pl in the $topDir/pc/<host> folder with the
following:

$Conf{FullPeriod} = 999; #hmmm... could a value of -1 mean infinite?
$Conf{IncrPeriod} = 999;

This would still allow admin users to browse the backups and start
backups explicitly if necessary, without the periodic automatic backup
attempts.  Sorry if I missed the section in the docs that describes a
better way to do this...

Paul.