Comments on: How to Sync Files/Directories Using Rsync with Non-standard SSH Port

By: KRay

KRay — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 22:15:17 +0000

If you get this article then you HAVE to take it to the next level. And yes — there are various ‘better’ ways to change/specify the ssh port and the connection ABSOLUTELY should be key’d, but I digress…

The next level is doing a differential HARD-linked backup set.
ie: I’ve already backed up the remote directory to local backup “1”.

--link-dest=/my_backups/1

Put it all together (well, as I do it) for the second and onward backup:

# rsync -avx --human-readable --progress --stats --delete --ignore-errors --force --exclude-from=${EXCLUDE_FILE} \
 --link-dest=/my_backups/1 -e 'ssh -p ${MY_PORT} ' ${USER}@${REMOTE_HOST}:/remote_directory/   /my_backups/2

What this does only transfer new (or changed) files via rsync, otherwise we already have the file in the previous backup set, HARD-link to the file.
This takes up no more space (except using another inode pointing to the data) — and the data exists until the last linked file is deleted.

I have servers rsync’ing multiple times per hour allowing for snapshots, if you will, going back many many months with minimal overhead for ALL those backups (hundreds) — only new data. Wipe the oldest as space requires…

By: GottZ

GottZ — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 07:09:34 +0000

lol. Security reasons.. did you ever hear about certificates?
at least explain your concerns.
in my case I noticed a Rapid decrease in attempts to login to my Servers by just removing root from password as well as key auth.
unless someone knows your account name nobody could Start bruteforcing your password. though its better to just rely to passphrased ssh Keys only.

By: BasketCase

BasketCase — Sat, 12 Dec 2015 17:48:22 +0000

In reply to Tomas.

And you should put your non-standard ssh key files in ~/.ssh/config too using the IdentityFile setting. Note that whenever you specify an IdentityFile you should also turn on IdentitiesOnly.

By: BasketCase

BasketCase — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 21:30:10 +0000

Just define your non-standard ssh ports in ~/.ssh/config file like so:

Host 192.168.1.103
Port 1431

Now all ssh based tools will just work without any extra command line hassle.

By: bjrosen

bjrosen — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 19:30:18 +0000

The right way to do this is to put the port in the .ssh/config file, that way you don’t need to remember the port numbers. In addition to security the other advantage is that it allows you access many machines from a single IP address. On your router you need to port forward each port to the appropriate machine then you need to alias the different names to the same IP (this is easy to do if you are using dyn.com as your dynamic DNS service, I’m sure it’s trivial with any DNS service). Once you’ve done that you can ssh into different machines by specifying the port number. Below is an example .ssh/config.

Host tom.foobar.com
Port 21010
BatchMode yes
Compression no
KeepAlive yes

Host jerry.foobar.com
Port 21011
BatchMode yes
Compression no
KeepAlive yes