Backing up individual user home dirs using user privs.

[Michael Carmody]

Hey All,

After RTM, web page and searching the archives, I felt it worth a shot at 
mailing the list with my query.

I am looking at using rsync and various third party GUI's (rsyncX, nasbackup) 
to backup our departmental desktops to our nice new multi-terabyte 
fileserver.

When we run rsync in daemon mode, it of course runs as nobody:nogroup and I am 
aware of being able to set that to any other given user. But we want to 
backup the users desktops to their home directory on the 
server, /home/user1, /home/user2 which are of course owned by user1 and 
user2.

When we rsync to this the rsync daemon running as nobody cannot write to the 
home directories.

So I have two problems, how do i get rsync to take on the permissions of the 
user uploading their backup ?

And how do I configure rsyncd.conf to create "home" modules per user ? ATM we 
have a [homes] which points to /home, but we are only relying on file 
permissions to restrict users to their directory, ( or would if permissions 
were being set to the right user at login) can we do a samba style homes 
config ?

-Michael Carmody
Dept of Microbiology and Immunology
The University of Melbourne