Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I failed to get BackupPC 3.0 working last time I tried with the TAR install. Found it’s available as an RPM.

# yum install BackupPC
# service httpd start

Browsing http://localhost/BackupPC popped up a prompt for username and password for “BackupPC” at http://localhost. Neither BackupPC’s password nor root’s worked.
File /etc/httpd/conf.d/BackupPC.conf says:
AuthUserFile /etc/BackupPC/apache.users
So I created apache.users file with my user name (not backuppc) in it.
Now can see the BackupPC page, but it says it’s unable to connect to the BackupPC server.

# service backuppc start

Started full backup from web interface. It failed:
Read EOF: Connection reset by peer
Tried again: got 0 bytes
Done: 0 files, 0 bytes
Got fatal error during xfer (Unable to read 4 bytes)
Backup aborted (Unable to read 4 bytes)

The problem is that BackupPC is trying to SSH to root, but there’s no key to allow backuppc to log in without a password.
See http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/ssh.html#how_do_i_setup_openssh or:

$ su -
# su -s /bin/bash backuppc
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa
At password prompts, press enter.
$ exit
Edit ~root/.ssh/authorized_keys and add ~backuppc/.ssh/id_dsa.pub
Optionally append from="localhost.localdomain" if you only want backuppc to ssh to root from the local host.
# chmod u=rw,go= ~root/.ssh/authorized_keys

To test, su to backuppc as above and run ssh root@localhost. You should be logged in without having to enter a password.