On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Kevin Fries <kevin@fries-biro.com> wrote:

Mike,

Leave your sudoers file alone and add your user to the sudo group instead. Much more flexible.

Kevin

On Jul 4, 2013 4:28 PM, "Michael Havens" <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:
I wanted to add my user to the sudoers file so I typed in 'visudo. and put my userid where I figure it should go. Now whenever I type 'sudo <?>' the output of the shell is:

bmike1@PresarioLapTop1:/home$ sudo mkdir /backups
sudo: parse error in /etc/sudoers near line 14

sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin

so I think I'll go in and put it the way it was:

bmike1@PresarioLapTop1:/home$ sudo visudo
sudo: parse error in /etc/sudoers near line 14
sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin

Here is the sudoers file:

#
# This file MUST be edited with the 'visudo' command as root.
#
# Please consider adding local content in /etc/sudoers.d/ instead of

# directly modifying this file.
#
# See the man page for details on how to write a sudoers file.
#
Defaults env_reset
Defaults mail_badpass
Defaults secure_path="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"

# Host alias specification
bmike1

# User alias specification

# Cmnd alias specification

# User privilege specification

root ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# Members of the admin group may gain root privileges
%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command

%sudo ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

# See sudoers(5) for more information on "#include" directives:

#includedir /etc/sudoers.d

HEY! Look at that. I put my user in the wrong space. I meant to put it under '# User alias specification' but now I see that is wrong; I needed to put it under '# User privilege specification'.

Also, what about the "ALL's". What do they mean?
Can I fix this with VI? I'm not just doing it because I don't want to mess this up so bad I need to reinstall
:-)~MIKE~(-:

On Thu, Jul 4, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Michael Havens <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:

Okay Matt (or anyone else who wants to answer this), could I do this:
first I make a directory in the usb called 'bmike1-backup'

#!/bin/bash
sudo mkdir /backups <-create backups dir

sudo mount /sdc1/backup-bmike1 /backups <- tell computer to see a directory in the usb drive as /backups
rsync -av /home/bmike1
sudo umount backups; sudo rmdir backups <-make everything like it was

On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Matt Graham <danceswithcrows@usa.net> wrote:

1. Plug this disk in. Usually, removable disks have 1 partition of type FAT32
or NTFS covering their whole space. (Check that this is the case, if not,
something weird may be going on.)

2. Make a filesystem with a label on this partition. "mke2fs -j -L MY_BACKUPS
/dev/sdN1" . Find what N is by looking at the output of dmesg | tail.

3. Make an entry for the partition you made in your /etc/fstab :

LABEL=MY_BACKUPS /mnt/backup ext3 noauto,users,noatime 0 0

4. As root, mkdir /mnt/backup if it doesn't exist, then mount this partition
on /mnt/backup , mkdir /mnt/backup/USER , and chown USER /mnt/backup/USER .

5. Make a shell script sort of like this:

#!/bin/bash
if [[ $1 == '--help' || $1 == '-h' ]] ; then
echo "backs up ~USER to backup drive."
exit;
fi

if mount | grep /mnt/backup > /dev/null ; then
rsync -av --delete-after /home/USER/ /mnt/backup/USER
else
echo "backup disk not mounted. Trying to mount it."
mount /mnt/backup
if mount | grep /mnt/backup > /dev/null ; then
echo "Is the disk plugged in? Can't mount, bailing."
exit 1
fi
rsync -av --delete-after /home/USER/ /mnt/backup/USER
umount /mnt/backup
fi

6. Any time you want to make a backup, plug your disk in, and run that shell
script. The initial rsync will take some time. Subsequent rsyncs will take a
couple of minutes.

This is AFAICT a reasonably good way to do things, because it doesn't take a
lot of time to keep your backup up to date, and restoring is as simple as
mounting the backup disk and copying things over. Since there is only 1
backup, though, you could delete something, make a backup, then realize you
needed that thing. I have 2 backup disks and rotate them every few days to
make that less likely.

You could even get fancy and use dm-crypt to back up your stuff to an
encrypted disk, which is useful in some situations like when you want to leave
the disk somewhere that's not under your direct control like a friend's house.
Using dm-crypt makes things a bit more complex, but I can write another
message about that.

--
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

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