At 3:11 PM +0000 10/28/07, Timothy Murphy wrote: >I've been using rsync to backup my desktop >to another machine linked by ethernet. > >Actually, to date I have only been backing up >my own files, and have had no problems. >But I was thinking of backing up the whole system, >and I discovered that I would have to allow >root login with ssh. >I know how to do this in the sshd config >but would prefer not to do it if possible. > >Is there a simple way round this? Use an ssh key: locally run `sshkeygen -t rsa` (or dsa), append the resulting public key to the server's /root/.ssh/authorized_keys, set the server's /etc/ssh/sshd_config PermitRootLogin to "without_password" (or "forced_commands_only" and set up the command; I haven't tried that), restart sshd. See `man sshd_config` and `man ssh-keygen`. Use a good passphrase to locally protect the key (personally I use the remote machine's password which I have made reasonably strong -- I pull 10 or more letters and digits out of a bag). -- ____________________________________________________________________ TonyN.:' <mailto:tonynelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
