[TriLUG] Advice sought on Laptop backup

[Rick DeNatale]

I'd like to set up a process for backing my laptop up to my workstation/server.

The server is already doing scheduled rsync backups.  Right now I
periodically backup to an NFS accessible directory on the server using
rsync.  This directory then gets backed up in turn via the server's
scheduled backups, which gives me a historical backup.

I'd like to make this more automatic (so that it actually gets done regularly.

Of course, if I initiate the backup from the  laptop this needs to be
sensitive to whether or not the lan is actually accessible,
alternatively if I pull from the server, the backup script or whatever
needs to be sensitive to whether or not the laptop can be accessed.

If I'm on the road (which is rare these days) I'd also like to be able
to manually control the backup over an ssh connection to the mother
ship, which leads me to think that the push strategy would be better.

Any suggestions on the best way to accomplish this?  Are there any
existing packages/solutions?

If not what's the best way to determine lan status?

The laptop is configured to use DHCP, and when at home, it gets my
local nameserver. Currently I'm not dynamically updated the local DNS
server, I just configure dhcpd to statically map hostnames and ip
addresses to specific mac addresses.

>From the laptop I was thinking about a grep test on /etc/resolv to see
if I am using the lan nameserver.  Is this reliable? Are there better
ways?  Other alternatives might be grepping the output of either
ping -c n,
for some small n or
dig server.local.domain

If I want to have the server find out whether the laptop is there
what's the best way?

--
Rick DeNatale

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