NFS question..

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 10:20:10AM -0700, Christopher Wagner wrote:
> I will look into both ideas, either TCP/NFS or SMB..  Both machines do
> support SMB, so that might not be a bad idea..
> 
> As for leaving the IP/hostnames of the machines, are they real?  Are they
> really the machines I'm talking about?  Hmm..  One never knows. :)

To revisit the original question, since NFS is a poor idea for anything
outside of your local network...

Why, exactly, are you doing an NFS mount?  You gave a reason of wanting to
do network backups of a database?  Backing up the raw database files over
NFS is bound to be problematic; databases really need to be locked instead.

I have two alternate suggestions:
1) database dump (if it was a MySQL database, "mysqldump"), preferably with
SSL or an SSH tunnel involved.

2) SSH/scp.  Look in "man sshd" under the "AUTHORIZED_KEYS FILE FORMAT"
section; you can limit a given SSH key to running a *single* command.  (you
can also limit it to working from a single IP address, disable port
forwarding, forbit agent forwarding and prevent tty allocation in there)
With that stuff on, it's reasonable to create a key for that *single*
purpose and not have a passphrase on it.  A command of "tar czf -
/dir/to/back/up" in authorized_keys is pretty simple; just 
"ssh other-host command_that_will_be_ignored > other-host-db-backup-`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S`.tar.gz"
on the other end.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart                                  eric-dot-sig at eisenhart.com
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