Sat, 29 Dec 2018

Restic Systems Backup Setup, Part 5 - minio multi-user support

This is Part 5 of my series on building a restic-based system backup series. The rest of the articles can be found here.

One of the original design decisions in my restic systems backup setup was isolation between hosts. I didn't want root on one system to be able to access the backups of other hosts, even if they were storing backups on a common backup server.

At that time, Minio, the object storage server I was using on the backup server, only supported single-tenancy — there was a single "access key"/"secret key" per instance, with access to every object and every bucket in that instance. Minio's recommendation at the time was to run multiple instances, each on a distinct port, to provide isolation. That's the solution I went with at that time.

Sometime in October, when I was pre-occupied with my wedding, Minio added Multi-User Support. This support adds the ability to have multiple users per Minio instance, each with distinct access and secret keys, and adds decent support for S3-style policies. After a bit of experimentation I was able to figure out a setup where I could run a single Minio instance, put each system's backup in a distinct bucket, and create policies that kept everything separate.

This would greatly simplify my backup setup, and ties in with some other changes I want to make. I want to make it much more easier to add and remove backup clients, and to get the current status of them, amongst other things. I've also started eating, well, not my dogfood, but work's dogfood, and I've got a running Consul and Vault cluster running, and I want to start leveraging that as well.

Expect the next post in this series to talk about the new setup, while hopefully avoiding System 2.0 tarpits.

Posted at: 12:47 | category: /computers/backups/restic-systems-backups | Link

Sat, 20 Jan 2018

Restic Systems Backup Setup, Part 4.5 - Why not just rclone

This is Part 4.5 of my series on building a restic-based system backup series. The rest of the articles can be found here.

.@thomaskula nice article! Did you consider just running rclone in a loop?

— restic (@resticbackup) January 15, 2018

After I posted part 4 of my restic backup series, @resticbackup asked the above question, and I thought trying to answer it would be a good intermediate article.

As a brief background, rclone describes itself as "rsync for cloud storage". It can talk to a rather comprehensive number of storage providers as well as local storage, and can perform operations as simple mkdir, cp and ls and ones as complicated as syncing between two different storage providers. It, like rsync, is a useful tool in your kit.

So why not just run rclone in a loop? Actually, that might not be a bad idea, and it's certainly a simple one. Pick a loop sleep that matches your replications needs, put some error checking in, and fire away. If I were going to do this, I'd likely use rclone copy rather than rclone sync. copy will copy files from the source to the destination, but will not delete any files on the destination which do not exist on the source. sync on the other hand, will make the source and destinations look exactly the same.

My preference for copy over clone is two fold. First, I like the idea of having different retention policies at different repositories. For example, some of the storage provider options are so inexpensive, for my scale of storage needs, that I basically treat them as "just shove things in there forever, I don't care", or, at least, care about once a year. On the other hand, local fast storage is much more expensive, that perhaps I can only afford to keep, say, a week or two of backups around for all of my systems. By treating the repositories as distinct, and with the append-only nature of restic, I can do that, keeping what I'm likely to need for most restore operations at hand, and keeping longer term, much much less likely to be needed restored data off some place where it's harder to access but cheaper to keep.

The second reason for treating the repositories separate is it helps guard against "oh shit!" moments: if you are cloning every five minutes and you accidentially delete some data you need, you've got a narrow window to realize that and stop the clone. At some point in your life, you will do this — I remarked once that "[s]ome people think I'm smart, but that's not it. I just remember exactly what each of those bite marks on my ass means."

That all said, I'm going to keep using the mechanism I outlined in the last article, of firing off a new sync job every time a new snapshot appears. There's a few reasons for this. First, it's there, and its working. Baring some overriding need to change this setup, I don't plan on exerting energy to change it — for now.

Second, there is some amount of overhead cost here every time I do a sync. My goal is that data starts being synced within a couple minutes of a new snapshot being created. I'm still, however, mostly doing the one-backup-a-day-late-at-night model (at least for now). With that, I'll actually have work to do less than one-tenth of one percent of the time, which just feels off. I'll admit, of course, that's just a gut feeling. In addition, even if I'm not copying data, building up a list of what I have locally and, more importantly, what's at the remote repository, has some cost. All of the storage providers charge something for operations like LIST, etc. That said, honestly, I haven't ran the math on it and the charge here is almost certainly one or two epsilons within nothing, so perhaps this isn't much of a reason to care.

The two important bits on conclusion: first, I have something working, so I'm going to keep using it until it hurts to do so, which, honestly, is a good chunk of the reason I do many things. We'll be fancy and call it being "pragmatic". Second, your needs and costs and criteria are certainly different from mine, and what's best for you requires a solid understanding of those things — one size certainly doesn't fit all.

Posted at: 18:32 | category: /computers/backups/restic-systems-backups | Link

Mon, 15 Jan 2018

Restic Systems Backup Setup, Part 4 - Replication and Runsvdir

This is Part 4 of my series on building a restic-based system backup series. The rest of the articles can be found here.

Replication

A goal from the start of this project has been replicating backup date to multiple locations. A long personal and professional history of dealing with backups leads me to the mantra that it isn't backed up until it's backed up to three different locations. Restic has several features which make this easy: backend storage (to a first approximation) is treated as append only — a blob, one stored, is never touched although may be deleted as part of expiring snapshots. Second, everything is encrypted, so you can feel as safe spreading your data to any number of cost-effective storage providers as you trust restic's encryption setup (which I generally trust).

In general, I want the client systems to know only about one service, the server we're backing up to. Everything else, the replication to other storage, should happen on the backup server. Also, we want new snapshots to get replicated relatively soon after they are created. If I decide to make an arbitrary snapshot for whatever reason, I don't want to have to remember to go replicate it, or wait until "the daily replication job"

These criteria lend themselves to something which watches for new snapshots on the backup server. Restic makes this easy, as one of the very last things it does after a sucessful snapshot is make a new snapshot object. There's one directory to watch, and when a new object appears there, replicate. How to do that, though?

Minio does contain a notification system, and I strongly considered that for a while (to the point of submitting a patch to some incorrect documentation around that). But that offered two complications. First, setting up notification involves both changing the minio configuration file and also submitting some commands to tell it what you want notifications for, which complicates setup. Second, I quickly fell down a rabbit hole of building a RESTful notification service. This isn't impossible to overcome, but it was blocking the real work I wanted to do (more on that later).

My next consideration was using the Linux kernel inotify facility to watch for events in the snapshot directory, but that also fell under roughly the same problems as the previous solution, and also added some Linuxisms that I didn't want to add at this point. Of course, that said, I do freely use bash scripts, with some bashisms in them, instead of a strictly POSIX-compliant shell, but, frankly, I'm not all that interested in running this on AIX. So, take this all with an appropriate grain of salt.

The solution I finally set on is backup-syncd, the not as elegant but still useful setup. This simply runs in a loop, sleeping (by default for a minute) and then looking at the files in the snapshot directory. If the contents have changed, fire off a script to do whatever syncing you want to do. There's some extra stuff to log and be robust and pass off to the sync script some idea of what's changed in case it wants to use that, but otherwise it's pretty simple.

A decent part of systems engineering is fitting the solution you make to the problem you actually need to solve. I'm not expecting to back up thousands of systems to one backup server, so the overhead of a watcher script for each client waking up every minute to typically go back to sleep isn't really a consideration. And yes, depending on timing it could be almost two minutes before a system starts replicating, but that's close enough that I don't care. And while I do want to eventually build that RESTful syncing service to work with Minio's notification system, that's a desire to understand building those services robustly, and shouldn't get in the way of the fact that right now, I just want backups to work.

That said, another decent part of systems engineering is the ability to make that solution not fuck you over in the future. You have to be able to recognize that what fits now may not fit in the future, and while what you're doing now may not scale to that next level, it at least won't be a huge barrier to moving to that next level. In this case, its easy enough to swap out backup-syncd with something more sophisticated, should it be necessary. You could go another way, as well — for a low-priority client you could certainly configure backup-syncd to only wake up every few hours, or even forgo it completely in lieu of a classic cron-every-night solution, should the situation warrant.

Runsvdir

Now that we have more than one service running for each client, I've updated the setup to use a per-client runsvdir, which manages all the services a particular client needs to do backups. Here we have a top-level runsvdir, called by the systemd unit file, which is responsible for running the services for all clients. In turn, that top-level runsvdir runs one runsvdir for each client, which in turn runs minio and backup-syncd for that client. The idea here being that I want to treat each client as a single unit, and be able to turn it on and off at will.

There's a small issue with the way runsv manages services. To cleanly stop runsvdir and everything its running, you want to send it a SIGHUP. The way we start a client runsvdir is to make an appropriate symlink, which does what we expect. But when we remove that symlink, the supervising runsvdir sends the client runsvdir a SIGTERM signal, which makes the client runsvdir go away without touching the child runsv processes it started. You can customize what happens to the client runsvdir process, however, and I'll be doing that in a future phase of this project.

Future wants

I'll end here by outlining some future ideas and wants for this setup:

Posted at: 12:29 | category: /computers/backups/restic-systems-backups | Link

Thu, 02 Nov 2017

Restic Systems Backup Setup, Part 3 - Setting up a client

This is Part 3 of my series on building a restic-based system backup series. The rest of the articles can be found here.

We've got enough things setup that we can start backing up a client system. We'll do this in two sections: setting up the server side, and setting up the client side.

Setting up the backup server side

Using 'new-restic-server' to set up the server

You can find new-restic-server in the git repo.

/backups/bin/new-restic-server -H aclient.example.com -p 9002

will set up all of the per-client setup on the backup-server: making a minio config and path for storage, setting up a runsv directory to run the minio server, and creating access key and secret for the minio server. You will have to make sure the port you picked (in this example, 9002) is distinct between all clients backing up to this service.

Activing the minio server

Activating the minio server is a distinct step, but an easy one with our runsvdir setup:

ln -s /backups/systems/aserver.example.com/conf/runsvs/minio /backups/systems/conf/runit/aserver.example.com-minio

A few seconds later, runsvdir will detect the new symlink and start the minio process.

Setting up the client side

Installing the binaries

I install these all in /usr/local/bin, you'll need to get a recent copy of restic, as well as the daily-restic-backups, restic-unroll and restic-wrapper scripts from the client directory of the git repo (handily linked at the end of this article).

Configuration

First, make an /etc/restic configuration directory: sudo install -o root -g root -m 700 -d /etc/restic

Create the environ file

/etc/restic/environ contains a series of environment variables that the restic client will use to identify the repo to backup to, as well as the access keys for it. It looks like the following: 

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=key goes here
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=secret key goes here
export RESTIC_REPOSITORY=s3:https://backup-server.example.com:9002/backups
export RESTIC_PASSWORD_FILE=/etc/restic/repo-password

Most of these are self-explanitory. The RESTIC_REPOSITORY is marked as s3 because that's what minio looks like to it. It ends in /backups because you have to put things in a "bucket" RESTIC_PASSWORD_FILE causes restic to read from that file, instead of prompting for a password.

Create include and exclude files

Now the hardest part, deciding what to backup and exclude. Everything will be backed up from /, use full paths in the include an exclude files, which go in /etc/restic/include-files and /etc/restic/exclude-files respectively.

Configure repo password

sudo /bin/sh -c 'pwgen 32 1 > /etc/restic/repo-password'

Here, we're using the pwgen command to generate a single, 32 character long password. YOU MUST NOT LOSE THIS. This is the encryption key used to encrypt everything in the repo, and without it, you won't be able to recover anything. I store mine in a GnuPG encrypted git repo that I backup outside of my restic setup.

Initialize the repo

sudo /usr/local/bin/restic-wrapper init

will initialize the repo. It will spit out something like:

created restic backend bcae9b3f97 at s3:https://backup-server.example.com:9002/backups Please note that knowledge of your password is required to access the repository. Losing your password means that your data is irrecoverably lost.

Set up a cron job to do daily backups

backups-cron.d contains a useful cron.d snippet to perform daily backups, modify to your taste.

Conclusion

We now have a client system which backs up daily to a backup server storing data in minio. Future articles will talk about automated replication to additional repositories for redundancy.

As a reminder, you can find the canonical repository of all my utility scripts in this series here. You can also find them at github.

Posted at: 10:40 | category: /computers/backups/restic-systems-backups | Link

Sat, 30 Sep 2017

Restic Systems Backup Setup, Part 2.5 - dealing with 'Unable to backup/restore files/dirs with same name'

This is Part '2.5' of my series on building a restic-based system backup series. The rest of the articles can be found here.

You should be reading Part 3 here, but in the development of that, I ran into this restic bug: Unable to backup/restore files/dirs with same name.

Unfortunately, for historic reasons (buried in some of the oldest code in restic), only the last component of a path being backed up in a restic repository is reflected in the repo. For example, in my case, when I wanted to back up both /local and /usr/local they would show up as local at the top of the repo, a very confusing state. Later versions of restic would rename things so there was a local-0 and a local-1, etc, but it's still very confusing.

The primary restic developer is working on resolving this, as many other people have ran into it, and it is expected to be fixed in restic 0.8. Until then, the suggestion is to tell restic simply to back up /, and exclude out everything you don't want to back up. A workable enough solution, but I still want something where I can think in terms of backing up what I want, and something else figures out how to do the exclusion. That way, I can just add or remove things from my list and I don't have to re-figure what to exclude. Or, things can come and go that I don't care about, and they won't accidentially get backed up.

A few hours of work and experimentation, and I had restic-unroll, which does just that. In the same directory in that git repo is an example bash script you might wrap things in to do a daily system backup.

As a reminder, you can find the canonical repository of all my utility scripts in this series here

Posted at: 17:58 | category: /computers/backups/restic-systems-backups | Link

Sat, 16 Sep 2017

Restic Systems Backup Setup, Part 2 - Running minio under runit under systemd

Part 2 of my series on building a restic-based system backup setup. Part 1 can be found found here.

As described in Part 1, my general strategy is to have a centralized backup server at a particular location, running an instance of minio for each server being backed up. In essence, I'm going to want to be running N minio server --config-dir=/... instances, and I want a simple way to add and start instances, and keep them running. In essence, I want a simple init service.

Fortunately, if you're looking for a simple init service, you need look no further than runit. It's an incredibly tiny init-like system, composed of some simple tools: runsv to run a service, keep it up and optionally log stdout output somewhere; sv to control that service by simply talking to a socket; and runsvdir to keep a collection of runsv instances going. Defining a service is simple, in a directory there is a run file, which is used by runsv to start the service. If you want to log, create a log subdirectory, with it's own run file — that file is executed and given the stdout of the main process as its input (the included svlogd command is a simple process for handling logs). To run a bunch of runsv instances, put them (or symlinks to them) all in a single directory, and point runsvdir at it. As a bonus, runsvdir monitors that directory, and if a runsv directory is created or goes away, runsvdir does the right thing.

It's an incredibly useful set of commands, and allows you to manage processes fairly easily. In this case, every time I add a machine to this backup scheme, I make an appropriate runsv dir with the correct minio incantation in the run file, and just symlink it into the runsvdir directory. We've been using runit at work for quite a while now in containers, and it's an awsome tool.

My newly-minted backup server is running Debian Stretch, which uses systemd as its init system. Creating systemd unit files is still something I have to think about hard whenever I do it, so here's the one I use for runit: 

[Unit]
Description=Backup Service Minio Master runsvdir

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/runsvdir -P /backups/systems/conf/runit/
Restart=always
KillMode=process
KillSignal=SIGHUP
SuccessExitStatus=111
WorkingDirectory=/backups/systems
User=backups
Group=backups
UMask=002

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Here, systemd starts runsvdir, pointing it at my top-level directory of runsv directories. It runs it as the backups user and group, and makes it something that starts up once the system reaches "multi-user mode".

Part 3 is coming, where I'll document backing up my first system.

Posted at: 18:41 | category: /computers/backups/restic-systems-backups | Link

Sat, 09 Sep 2017

Restic Systems Backup Setup, Part 1

This is the first in what will undoubtedly be a series of posts on the new restic-based system backup setup.

As I detailed earlier this week, I've started playing around with using restic for backups. Traditionally, I've used a variant of the venerable rsync snapshots method to backup systems, wrapped in some python and make, of all things. Some slightly younger scripts slurp everything down to a machine at home so I've got at least another copy of everything.

In my previous post, I discussed my initial attempt at restic, simply replicating that home backup destination into Backblaze B2. That works, but it feels a bit brute-force, and there have been other things I've wanted to change about this for a while:

Replicating from colo to home takes an order of magnitude longer: Backing up the ten or so VMs I have on my colo machine takes about 10 minutes. Pulling that down to home takes 100 minutes or so. (I'll note here that the bulk of my 'large' data is in AFS; what I'm backing up on systems is primarily configuration files, logs, and some things that happen to live locally on a system).

Some of this is due to the fact that the replication traffic goes from Michigan to New York, while the initial backups are all happening within the same physical host. But the larger part, I think, is due to the fact that in order to replicate my system backups, I have to preserve hardlinks. A bit of background here: the 'rsync snapshots' method works by using the --link-dest option to rsync. As I backup a system, if the file hasn't been changed, rsync makes a hardlink to the corresponding file in the --link-dest directory. This doesn't use any additional space, and it's an easy way of keeping, say, fourteen days worth of backups while only using more space for the files that change from day-to-day. Most of my systems keep that may days of backups around.

Since I want to replicate all of those backups (and not, for example, only replicate the latest day's worth of backups), but I want to keep the space savings that --link-dest gets me, I need to use the -H argument to the replicating rsync so it can scan all the files to be sent to find multiply hard-linked files. This takes a long long time — so much so that the sshd man page warns about it:

Note that -a does not preserve hardlinks, because finding multiply-linked files is expensive. You must separately specify -H.

The backing-up or replicating rsync must run as root: Of course the rsync on the machine being backed up must run as root, it needs to be able to read everything to be backed up. But the destination side also has to run as root, because I want to preserve permissions and ownership, and only root can do this. I've long wished for an rsync 'server' that spoke the rsync protocol out one side and simply stored everything in some sort of object storage. Unfortunately, the rsync protocol is less a protocol and more akin to C structs shoved over a network, as far as I understand. And the protocol isn't really defined except as "here's some C that makes it go".

Restoring files is done entirely on the backup server: Because of the previous issue, I didn't want root on the client servers to ssh in as root on the backup server — I felt it was much safer and easier to isolate backups by having the backup server reach out to do backups. There's no ssh key on the client to even be able to get into the backup server. It's not a big issue, but if I need to restore a handful of files spread out I've got kinda stage them somewhere and then get them over to the client system. And because the backup server has a command-restricted ssh key on the client server, it takes some convoluted paths to get stuff moved around.

Adding additional replicas adds even more suck: Adding another replica means another 100 minutes somewhere pulling stuff down. And it also means a full-blown server, someplace where I can run rsync as root, and it's got to be some place I trust. Also, most of the really cheap storage to be found is in object storage, not disks (real or virtual) — part of what attracted me to restic in the first place.

When I started playing with restic, I saw a tool that could solve a bunch of those problems. Today I've been playing around with it, and here's my ideas so far.

Distinct restic repositories: One of the benefits of restic is the inherent deduplication it does within a repo. And if I were backing up a large number of systems, I might save something by only having one copy of, say, /etc/resolv.conf. But really, most of what I'm backing up is either small configuration files, or log files. And these days, the few tens of gigabytes of backups I have there isn't really worth deduplicating. In addition, the largest consumer of backup space for me — stupidly unrotated log files that get a little bit appended to them every day — would benefit from the deduplication, even if it's only deduplicating on a single system.

More important than that, however, is that I want isolation between my systems. For example, the backups of my kerberos kdc are way more important than, say, web server logs. And I really don't want something that would run on a public-facing system be able to see backups for an internal system. So, distinct repositories.

Use minio as the backend: My first thought when I was going to experiment was to use the sftp backend to restic. But to isolate things fully, I'd have to make a distinct user on the backup server to hold backups for each client, and that sounds like too damn much work.

Unrelated, I've been playing around with minio. Essentially, it's about the simplest thing you can get that exposes the 90% of S3 that you want. "Here's an ID and a KEY, list blobs, store blobs, get blobs, delete blobs". Because it's very simple, it doesn't offer multi-tenancy, so I will have to run a distinct minio for each client. That said, I think that should be easy enough, especially if I use something like runit to manage all of them.

Benefit from the combination of minio and restic for replication: Minio is very simplistic in how it stores objects: some/key/name is stored as the file /top/of/minio/storage/some/key/name. This has two benefits: first, because the minio storage directory is also a restic repository, I can just point a restic client at that directory, and as long as I have a repository password, I can see stuff there. Second, every file in the restic repository other than the top level 'config' file is named after the sha256 hash of the file as it exists on disk, and all files in a repository are immutable. This makes it trivial to copy a restic repository elsewhere. While I'll likely start by simply using the b2 command line tool to sync things into B2, I think you can do it even faster. I haven't looked deeply, but my gut feeling is that the b2 sync command looks at the sha1 hash of the source file to decide if it needs to re-upload a file that exists already in B2. We don't need to do that at all; repository files are named after their sha256 hash, so if the files have the same name, they have the same contents [0]. So moving stuff around is incredibly trivial.

Future niceties. I've got a bunch of other ideas floating around in the back of my head for restic. One is a repository auditing tool: since nearly everything in restic is named for the sha256 hash of the file content, I'd like a tool I could run every day that would pull down, say, 1/30th of the files in the repository and run sha256 on them, to make sure there's no damage.

The second is some way of keeping a local cache of the restic metadata so operations what have to read all that are much faster. Third, and related, a smarter tool for syncing repositories. For example, I'd love to, say, keep three days of backups in my local repository, and be able to shove new things to an S3 repository but keeping seven days there, and shove things in B2 and keep there until my monthly bill finally makes me care.

Anyways, this has been a few hour brain dump of a few hours of experimentation, so I'll end this part here.

Posted at: 19:12 | category: /computers/backups/restic-systems-backups | Link