Quick setup guide for boxbackup system -------------------------------------- NOTE: The debian package should handle most of the configuration for you via debconf. However this is a quick guide if you prefer to do this by yourself. If you want to use debconf to configure Boxbackup, do NOT follow those explanations. Jump directly to the section on Managing certificates Boxbackup-server configuration ------------------------------ You need to create the server configuration files contained in /etc/boxbackup. For this you must first use the raidfile-config script. raidfile-config /etc/boxbackup 2048 /raid/0.0 /raid/0.1 /raid/0.2 where: - /etc/boxbackup is the location of the configuration files (don't change that as several scripts use that by default) - 2048 is the block size of the RAID system, this should be set to the block size of the underlying filesystem - the three following path names are the location of the 3 RAID partitions used by boxbackup to store the backup. They should be on 3 different physical drive. You can disable the use of userland RAID by specifying only one path name. You should now have a file /etc/boxbackup/raidfile.conf that you can customize to add another set of disc. Now run the bbstored-config script: bbstored-config /etc/boxbackup serverhostname bbstored where: - /etc/boxbackup is the location of the configuration files (don't change that as several scripts use that by default). - serverhostname is the fqdn name of the server you are installing on, this is used to determine on wich interface the daemon will listen on. - bbstored is the user the server will run under, this user is automatically created by the Debian package. Now you have to manage your certificate. See below for this. To manage the client accounts use the bbstoreaccounts utility. To add an account: bbstoreaccounts create ACCOUNT_NUMBER DISC_SET SOFT_QUOTA HARD_QUOTA where: - ACCOUNT_NUMBER is the account number to create, a 8 digits hexadecimal number. - DISC_SET is a disc set number defined in /etc/boxbackup/raidfile.conf where the files for that account will go into. - SOFT_QUOTA is the soft storage quota size, the client will avoid to upload files when reaching that limit - HARD_QUOTA is the hard storage quota size, the server will not store files when reaching that limit. An exemple of invocation: bbstoreaccounts create 1EF235CA 0 1024M 1250M (suffixes M, G and B are accepted for quota size meaning respectively Megabytes, Gigabytes and Blocks) Boxbackup-client configuration ------------------------------ You need to create the client configuration files contained in /etc/boxbackup. For this you must use the bbackupd-config script. bbackupd-config /etc/boxbackup lazy ACCOUNT_NUMBER SERVER_NAME /var/lib/bbackupd BACKUP_DIR [[BACKUP_DIR]...] where: - /etc/boxbackup is the location of the configuration files (don't change that as several scripts use that by default). - lazy: backup mode, could be lazy (continuous scan of filesystem) or snapshot (backup launch by a cron script, see /etc/cron.d/boxbackup-client) - ACCOUT_NUMBER: your account number provided by the backup server administrator - SERVER_NAME is the fqdn name of the server you will connect to. - /var/lib/bbackupd: location of working directory (don't change) - BACKUP_DIR: a list of directories to backup (they must not contain another mounted filesystem) Managing certificates --------------------- For this you need to use the bbstored-certs script contained in the boxbackup-server package. To initialise your CA (creates a "ca" directory with private key and certificate in it) launch: bbstored-certs ca init To sign a server certificate: bbstored-certs ca sign-server server-csr.pem To sign a client certificate: bbstored-certs ca sign clientaccount-csr.pem You will find a more detailled documentation on the boxbackup Web site: http://www.boxbackup.org "Upstream" tarball ------------------ Althogh upstream indeed publishes tarballs, the debian package is no longer based on these tarballs. The reason for this is that the procedure for creating these tarballs makes package maintenance and interaction with upstream unnecessary hard. Moreover, there seem to be different types of tarballs. Official ones used for a release and "unofficial" ones that are created for snapshot releases, causing further confusion. Since upstream releases rather seldomly, but we want to distribute pre-releases and integrate patches from the upstream svn, the package ships a script in the source that is used to create the orig.tar.gz. -- Reinhard Tartler , Wed, 1 Apr 2009 16:24:42 +0200