SSH Over Non-Standard Ports

My ~/.ssh/config file had something like:

Host bb
Hostname blahblah.com
Port 1234
User ioconnor

so I only had to type “ssh bb” but it’s confusing. Now I’ve changed the config file to:

Host blahblah.com
Port 1234

and use the familiar form of “ssh ioconnor@blahblah.com”. Now all additional utilities that may ride on top of ssh are not confused and can work as they were designed. Much more elegant though not as fancy.

Automatic Backup With Rsync And Cron On Ubuntu

Keeping a directory automatically backed up somewhere is always useful. Every few months this is needed on one machine or another. Here are the steps:

1. First set up ssh keys so passwords are no longer needed.
   1. Test things by verifying a ‘ssh user@yourserver.com’ does require a password.
   2. Make some ssh keys on your client and then move the public key to the server
      1. cd ~/.ssh
      2. ls
      3. ssh-keygen -t dsa (Keep the defaults by just pressing enter a few times.)
      4. ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@yourserver.com
   3. Test things by verifying a ‘ssh user@yourserver.com’ no longer requires a password.
2. Determine the directory to be backed up and where it will be backed up and test the command to be used.
   1. time rsync -atvz ~/local-directory-of-your-choosing/ user@youserver.com:remote-directory-of-your-choosing/
   2. log in the server and verify the files are there…
3. Put the command in cron. Because cron is broken in ubuntu you can’t simply do “crontab -e” anylonger. (How can something so basic be broken?!) Instead follow these instructions:
   1. vi ~/some_file and put in the cron commands
   2. @hourly rsync -atvz ~/local-directory-of-your-choosing/ user@youserver.com:remote-directory-of-your-choosing/
   3. crontab ~/some_file
   4. crontab -l

Now simply test it out…

UPDATED ON 2013-02-02: Used “ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub user@yourserver.com” to reduce 10 or so steps and make things vastly simpler.
UPDATED ON 2013-02-05: I came across this article today and realized I should probably update this to use the “–delete” and “-e ssh” commands. I am already a big user of the delete command but I don’t often use ssh because my backups are local for the most part.