Forum ©XSIBackup: ©VMWare ©ESXi Backup Software

Lachmex

Member

Registered: 2017-07-27

Posts: 1

connection parameters (username and password or key)

Hello,

for first, thanks for your great software!

Right now we trying to solve some difficulties with payed XSI Backup and I hope that you will be able to help us with this little bit

Short background: We have 2 esx servers in different locations and with different account systems. So basically we need to use one account on 1st system and different account on 2nd (destination) system. Main problem is that XSI backup don't have this ability to specify account for ssh/scp connection - or I am wrong? So, our idea is to use cron job (invoked by root) which will contain cmds for xsibackup script and also connection parameters (username and password or key).

So, I want to kindly ask you, if there is a possibility to implement this feature/parameters or you will show me a different way how to do that.

thanks

Jan

roberto

Moderator

Registered: 2017-04-22

Posts: 49

Re: connection parameters (username and password or key)

Thank you!

There isn't any good solution to that. It's not something about XSIBackup, you do need to write to system files to get XSIBackup up and running, and that requires root access, nothing to do here.

You also need full access to be able to run backups succesfully, as VM configuration files need to be modified to, per instance, remove disks or snapshots. You would enter a nightmare if you pretended to control your backups based on different users with different privileges as a personal project. We might offer that feature once the 10.0.0 branch is well secured and stable, but still, it might not be possible.

You cannot use Linux tools such as expect https://linux.die.net/man/1/expect to pass the password in a script cause they're simply not available. ESXi is a totally cut down environment.

That said, there's nothing that prevents you from copying your XSIBackup public key to the remote server's authorized_keys file, but that file is unique and might not be accessible to other users than root. ESXi's shell is not a regular Linux system, you can't assume you can interact with it in a "normal" way.