Doing backups without being root

From: <jonh_at_hitl.washington.edu>
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 95 09:16:04 -0800

After changing a bunch of things around at our site, I broke my old
custom backup program (a curses C program which calls rdump's locally
and remotely). I spent a lot of time writing a nice super-configurable
version, and figured that in the process, I should fix things so that
I was doing everything as the backup user, and not /.rhosting myself
wide open.

I got most of this working; my raw disk devices are readable by the system
group, and the backup user is in that group. The problem I have is that
when I do an rdump from a remote host, I get:

   : Executing command: /usr/sbin/rdump ubf0 64 fridge:/dev/nrmt0a / :
   : rcmd: socket: Permission denied :
   : rdump: Cannot establish connection to remote rmt command :
   : rmthost(): rcmd(): Permission denied :
   : rdump: The ENTIRE dump is aborted :

It appears that when rdump calls rcmd() to connect to the remote host, it
tries to make the connection FROM a reserved (0-1023) port, which doesn't
make sense. Anyway, it would seem that this is forcing me to run the rdump
command as root. Okay, not tragic, so I'll SUID it.

But, to make matters worse, you can't use the -f user_at_host:device form with
OSF's rdump, so I'd have to provide a /.rhost on my backup server.

Has anyone gotten this working without being root? I get the same
problem from an IRIX system, but a backup from a SunOS system works fine.
The tape server is also OSF.

(If anyone's interested in the menu driver I use for backups, let me know.)
Also, while I'm posting, I could use a URL to the Alpha-OSF-Managers searchable
archive. (I could only check the 1000 most recent messages, because that's
what I keep in my mailbox. :v)

        --Jon
Received on Wed Jan 25 1995 - 12:20:38 NZDT

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