Re: Trouble running rdiff-backup after Windows updates

[Michael Crider - HOEC]

The command in my first email works fine when run on the Windows 
machine, either directly or from within a batch file, locally in a 
command prompt or in an ssh terminal from another machine. It only fails 
when a shell script on another machine connects by ssh and run the batch 
file from the ssh command.
The equivalent from your command would be putting your rdiff-backup 
command in a batch file (with %%s in the remote-schema) and than from 
the Linux server running:
ssh username@windowsmachine rdiff-backup.bat

If you just ssh to the machine and run the batch file it works. If you 
put the batch file in the ssh command it fails.

On 11/1/21 1:11 PM, Dominic Raferd wrote:
> On 01/11/2021 15:21, Michael Crider - HOEC wrote:
> > We have used rdiff-backup for well over 10 years for our Linux 
> > servers and workstations, and until recently to back up Windows 
> > servers and workstations we mounted their drives locally on the 
> > backup server and ran rdiff-backup against the mount. When our first 
> > Windows 10 workstations arrived with v1909, we started having trouble 
> > reliably mounting the drives, so we recently put the Windows 
> > executable of 2.0.5 on our Windows workstations and tried the same 
> > method we use for Linux - a cron job on the backup server would ssh 
> > to the Windows workstation (running the built-in OpenSSH server) and 
> > call a batch file that would run rdiff-backup, sending the backup 
> > back to the server. Keys were in place to allow passwordless 
> > connections. This way we could schedule several workstations to run 
> > in sequence without having multiples overlap in time (as might happen 
> > if we did the scheduling at the workstation). That was very stable on 
> > workstations running Windows 10 1909 and below. Then we upgraded all 
> > of our workstations to 21H1. Now we can manually ssh to the Windows 
> > workstation and run the batch file and it runs just fine. But if we 
> > run the cron job script that does the ssh and runs the batch file, 
> > everything works (setting environment variables and updating specific 
> > local files from network masters using scp) until the rdiff-backup 
> > command. We don't have "echo off" on the batch file so we can see the 
> > command issued. It makes the connection to the backup server and 
> > starts rdiff-backup on it, but then it hangs and doesn't progress any 
> > further, and no files are updated in the backup destination. We 
> > started with rdiff-backup 2.05 using SysNative in the remote-schema, 
> > then moved to 2.1.0a1-64 to see if that helped (changing the 
> > remote-schema to System32 but leaving everything else the same). but 
> > nothing changed except for an added warning about the server not 
> > understanding the API. If we are running the cron script in a 
> > terminal we can press Ctrl-C and exit. If it runs from a cron 
> > schedule we have to kill rdiff-backup on either the workstation or 
> > the server. Has anyone else seen something similar?
> >
> > The command in the cron job is: ssh ${BACKUP_USER}@${TARGETHOST} 
> > rdiff-backup.bat ${BACKUPTO}; RDIFF_RESULT=$?
> >
> > The command in the batch file is: 
> > C:\rdiff-backup-2.1.0a1-64\rdiff-backup.exe -v 6 
> > --exclude-symbolic-links --remote-schema 
> > "C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe %%s rdiff-backup --server" 
> > --include "C:/FuturaData" --include "C:/Program Files (x86)/Futura 
> > Systems/FuturaGIS/Staking Client" --exclude 
> > "C:/Users/%BACKUP_USER%/AppData/Local/Temp" --exclude 
> > "C:/Users/%BACKUP_USER%/AppData/Local/ESRI/Local Caches" --include 
> > "C:/Users/%BACKUP_USER%" --exclude "C:/**" C:/ 
> > root@datasrv2.intra.hoec::%BACKUPTO%
> >
> > Both use environment variables set on the command line of the script 
> > or earlier in the script.
>
> It may not help much, but we run from Windows machines to a Linux 
> server using (a more complicated version of) the command below, which 
> works fine for rdiff-backup 2.0.5 and Windows 21H1:
>
> rdiff-backup.exe --remote-schema "\path\to\plink.exe -batch -P 22 -ssh 
> -i \path\to\privatekey.ppk %s rdiff-backup --server" -v 5 
> "C:/Users/ThisUser" thisuser@192.168.50.135::archive