Creating a superuser for backup purposes

[Admin32_1]

Hi everyone,

I have a linux server that I would like to backup. I am backing up from a Windows server using samba.
The dir's I would like to backup belong to different users and groups, so when I tried to backup the dir's I got "access denied" errors all over.

I thought of creating another "root" type user who would have full access to these dir's and files and have the Windows server log in as this new user so it then has access to everything it needs to backup.

Any ideas or sugestions ?

Thank you in advanced

[Ted Ellis_2]

instead of another user with userid 0... a security issue... you may want to create a standard user (call him backup for lack of something better). Once you have backup created, modify the user so that it belongs to all of the groups that the other directories belong too. Example...

2 directories need backing up. One has group ownership of sybase, and the other is group ownership users..

you create backup to have primary group as users. To also give access to Sybase directories:

usermod -G sybase backup

the capital G indicates a secondary group and will update the /etc/group file so backup has access as if they belonged to the group. You can add as many secondary group assignments as you want.

Ted

[J._1]

I've also been wondering about a workaround for creating another "0" user...

The only problem with using Group permissions is that files aren't always accessible via groups... especially in user home directories. Many config files/dirs (i.e. .pinerc, .gnome-priv) are only set for user access.

To get a proper backup of /home, is there any better way than another UID=0 user?

[Steven E. Protter]

I'm getting excellent backups using the following metholology.

I do backup to disk of important areas of the system. I do a tar file of /etc for configuration, one for the web data(This box is an ISP biz) to a reserved partition on the Linux box.

I currently have an ftp script on my backup server which downloads those files to a ntfs partition and grabs it.

My plan is to open up samba and let the backup server do those backups directly as a mapped hard disk.

You don't want any Microsoft boxes on your network with root or superuser priviledges, or passwords stored on them. Bad idea, a hacker will get in and trash you this way.

I bring down the server for monthly maintenance and do the following:

1) Boot from a boot desk that enables me to connect via an Intel NIC card to an NT server.
2) Use Norton Ghost 7.0 to take a complete image of the entire disk

It's big but I actually migrated an entire Red Hat Linux server this way.

Why is this good?

Because it creates a disaster recovery image that lets you recover from anything. If you need to build a new server someplace else, all you need to do is boot, fire up Ghost and restore the image. I backup the image to tape right after creating it.

Steve