How to create a special backup user with full read access

[RayN]

Hi,

I'm interested in creating a special backup user who has full read access to the entire file system to copy files off to a remote computer.

I can sudo or use root for this purpose but if possible I would prefer to use a special account with less privileges. I intend to use rsync with -e ssh or mount a volume with NFS to get the files on to the remote computer. I've found that using root for this purpose complicates using NFS (remote root user requires NFS export options like no_root_squash, etc). Alternatively if I could get a normal user to do the rsync operation over ssh I could do it password less easily with RSA keys and tools like ssh-agent and ssh-add.

I thought I could just create a user and add all groups to it - but there is always something I can't read.

e.g.

backup_user@kubuntu1:~/scripts$ rsync -v --timeout=999 -az -e 'ssh -c blowfish -ax' /var
   backup_user@$BACKUP_SERVER:/backup/$SHORTHOST/volumes
building file list ... rsync: opendir "/var/lib/nvidia" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/var/lock/lvm" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/var/run/sudo" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/var/run/cups/certs" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/var/spool/cups" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/var/spool/cron/crontabs" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/var/tmp/kdecache-root" failed: Permission denied (13)
rsync: opendir "/var/tmp/kdecache-nicholsr" failed: Permission denied (13)

The nvidia directory has permissions:

backup_user@kubuntu1:/var/lib$ sudo ls -adl nv*
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 2007-03-24 21:22 nvidia

I think what I'm trying to do shouldn't be that hard! Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks,
Ray.

[RayN]

Re: How to create a special backup user with full read access

I guess you just have to be root if you want to take a backup!

Ray.