Title: Configure BackupPC Server
Course: CIS 208: Linux/UNIX III: Intermediate System Administration, Networking, and Security ~ For IGNITE Review > Section: Learning Modules

Configure BackupPC Server

BackupPC provides an elegant solution for regular backups of system and user files.  See the website at http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ for more information and a list of features.

Since BackupPC requires non-standard settings for apache, it is recommended that it be installed on a server used only for this application.  BackupPC runs well in a virtual environment and it can use NFS connections to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device or a file server.

The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository provides the BackupPC package for Red Hat and Centos distributions.  See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL for information about installing and using the epel repository.

- Use yum to install the BackupPC package.

yum --enablerepo=epel install BackupPC

In the main configuration file for apache, change the User to backuppc and the Group to backuppc.

- Also change the DocumentRoot from /var/www/html to /usr/share/BackupPC.
- Create a password for the main administrative account.

In this example, the user is admin.

htpasswd -c /etc/BackupPC/apache.users admin

- Register this account with BackupPC by editing the /etc/BackupPC/config.pl file, and setting the CGIAdminUsers to 'admin'.

$Conf{CgiAdminUsers}     = 'admin';

- Start the services and ensure they start automatically in the future.

service httpd start
service backuppc start
chkconfig httpd on
chkconfig backuppc on

- Using a browser, connect to the webpage of the server.  You can configure which hosts to backup and what directories to include or exclude.  Before actually performing a backup using ssh, it will be necessary to create a set of keys for the backuppc user.

su - backuppc -s /bin/sh
ssh-keygen -t rsa
exit