KerbyServer

I have been a happy user of BackupPC for at least a couple years now. It makes backing up my various servers quite painless and worry free. Recently, an RPM for BackupPC version 3.0.0 was added to the Fedora 7 updates repository. Since Fedora 7's launch, version 2.1.2 of BackupPC was the only option. Personally, I was thinking the upgrade to BackupPC version 3 would be one of the sticky points when I upgrade to Fedora 8 in a couple months. Fortunately, the BackupPC package maintainer has been testing version 3 for some time now and just deployed it as stable to the updates repo.

Since I keep having to refer to the BackupPC FAQ for these steps, here is a concise list of steps to configure ssh keys on the client and server BackupPC systems:

On the client:
Log in as root
Generate the ssh key (remember to NOT set a password):
ssh-keygen -t rsa
touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2
Edit ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 and add the BackupPC public key.
Pre-pend the key with from="kerbsfedora.kerbyserver.net" to restrict access.

On the BackupPC server:
Log in as backuppc

It is worth noting that if ssh logins are not working in my typical BackupPC setup after trading public keys and such, it is worth checking the permissions on the users' home directories, .ssh directory, and the key, authorized_keys2, and known_hosts files. If the permissions are too liberal on any of these files, public key authentication will fail.