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.