rsnapshot on Debian Jessie not working when using ssh_args

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on March 18th 2016 - Listed in Linux

Came across a problem using rsnapshot on Debian Jessie when I tried to back up data from a remote host using SSH connection.

/usr/bin/rsnapshot -v daily
echo 3796 > /var/run/rsnapshot.pid
mv /backup/rsnapshot/daily.1/ /backup/rsnapshot/daily.2/
/bin/cp -al /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0 /backup/rsnapshot/daily.1
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded /home \
    /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0/localhost/
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded /etc \
    /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0/localhost/
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded \
    --rsh="/usr/bin/ssh -p 2200" root@p01:/etc \
    /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0/p01/
rsync: Failed to exec /usr/bin/ssh -p 2200: No such file or directory (2)
rsync error: error in IPC code (code 14) at pipe.c(85) [Receiver=3.1.1]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [Receiver]
rsync error: error in IPC code (code 14) at io.c(226) [Receiver=3.1.1]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
rsnapshot encountered an error! The program was invoked with these options:
/usr/bin/rsnapshot -v daily
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ERROR: /usr/bin/rsync returned 14 while processing root@p01:/etc/
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded \
    --rsh="/usr/bin/ssh -p 2200" root@p01:/mnt/containerdata \
    /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0/p01/
rsync: Failed to exec /usr/bin/ssh -p 2200: No such file or directory (2)
rsync error: error in IPC code (code 14) at pipe.c(85) [Receiver=3.1.1]
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [Receiver]
rsync error: error in IPC code (code 14) at io.c(226) [Receiver=3.1.1]
ERROR: /usr/bin/rsync returned 14 while processing root@p01:/mnt/containerdata/
touch /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0/
rm -f /var/run/rsnapshot.pid

 The problem seems to come from the ssh_args setting in rsnapshot.conf:

# ssh has no args passed by default, but you can specify some here.
#
ssh_args    -p 2200

 As the host, where I want to pull the backups from listens on port 2200, I enabled this option. I know for a fact that this was working on Debian Wheezy (rsnapshot 1.3.1-3). In Jessie this is rsnapshot 1.3.1-4 and seems broken.

I came across Ubuntu bug 1309710 and Debian bug 721043 which are basically the same. Indeed since 1.3.1-4 there seems to be a problem when ssh_args are used.

According to the Debian bug report, the bug was fixed in version 1.4.0-1 but as of today (March 2016) this version is not available on Jessie; only on Stretch which is the "testing" version at the moment. So much for "stable" :-(

For now I have solved this problem by defining the special port in the ssh client config:

cat ~/.ssh/config
Host p01
  Hostname p01
  User root
  Port 2200

 in rsnapshot.conf I disabled ssh_args again:

cat /etc/rsnapshot.conf | grep ssh_args -B 1
# 20160317 Claudio: DO NOT TOUCH, ITS BROKEN IN JESSIE!!!!
#ssh_args    -p 2200

And now rsnapshot runs as it should because the ssh options come directly from the ssh client and not from the config file:

/usr/bin/rsnapshot -v daily
echo 3916 > /var/run/rsnapshot.pid
mv /backup/rsnapshot/daily.2/ /backup/rsnapshot/daily.3/
mv /backup/rsnapshot/daily.1/ /backup/rsnapshot/daily.2/
/bin/cp -al /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0 /backup/rsnapshot/daily.1
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded /home \
    /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0/localhost/
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded /etc \
    /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0/localhost/
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded \
    --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh root@p01:/etc /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0/p01/
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --relative --delete-excluded \
    --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh root@p01:/mnt/containerdata \
    /backup/rsnapshot/daily.0/p01/

Update April 4th 2016:
The bug is now also fixed in Debian Jessie (since Release 8.4). From the apt changelog:

rsnapshot (1.3.1-4+deb8u1) jessie; urgency=medium

  * debian/patches/14_fix_rsh_args: fix regression on --rsh with args:
    Applied patch from Upstream to fix --rsh command line arguments with quotes.
    The --rsh=... argument to rsync was erroneously quoted when added to the
    @rsync_long_args_stack with options set. Thanks Jonas Genannt for the
    help.
-- Guillaume Delacour <gui@iroqwa.org>  Sun, 25 Oct 2015 23:33:28 +0100

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