Overview
Wee all need to backup our machines. But we also need to keep the data private and the backup procedure secured. In UNIX and Linux machines, we need to run the backup operation as root in order to read everything on the machines. But allowing remote connections as the root user is not exactly a good idea. So how to we proceed? We use rsnapshot(1) and rssh(1) together with OpenSSH to secure the whole process. Here's how to do it on CentOS 6.
In case you're running a heterogeneous network, please note that I've successfully configured this process on FreeBSD, PC-BSD, RedHat, Ubuntu, AIX and Solaris servers.
In this example, our backup server is called backup.company.com and is running CentOS 6 while the clients are :
