It demonstrates how SSH key authentication works. It's not a complete diagram, but it helps see all the parts of ssh key authentication in one place.

=== Generating a Public/Private Key Pair & Sharing the Public Key ===

When performing labs or assignments in this class, if you fail to make backups and something bad occurs and there is loss of data, it only affects you. On the other hand, if you are supporting a client, or working for a company and fail to adequately perform backups and there is loss of data, then other users are affected by failure to backup essential data.

=== Performing Full Backups ===

It will be your responsibility as an administrator of your own Linux system, to backup all of your VMs for labs and assignments at the end of your lab session. Learning to create shell scripts to automate routine tasks (such as backups) will be EXTREMELY useful for your NDD430 course.

=== Performing Incremental Backups ===

<ol><li value="4">If rsync prompts for a password, make certain that you completed the '''SSH key''' section above, and that you assigned the keys for the <u>appropriate user</u><br>(in this case, for the '''root user for both the hostname and vm1'''!)</li><li>When the rsync command runs correctly, you should see all the files from vm1 being copied over to your host machine.</li><li>Run the rsync command again. Notice that the second time nothing is copied over to your host machine since none of the files have changed on your vm1 machine.</li><li>Create a new file in vm1's '''/etc/''' directory, and rerun '''rsync'''. Confirm on your '''host machine''' that only that file that was created on your vm1 machine actually got backed up to your host machine.</li><li>Repeat the above steps to create backups for your '''vm2''' and '''vm3''' machines on your host machine as well (for the respective directories: '''/backup/incremental/vm2''' and '''/backup/incremental/vm3''').</li></ol>

=== Automating Backups (cron) ===

'''Cron''' is a ''daemon'' (i.e. a program that runs in the background). The term ''"Cron"'' is short for '''Chronograph''' which was an old fashioned term for a '''stop watch''' or '''timer'''. The role of '''Cron''' is to run tasks periodically. It can run tasks for the system (as root) or for a user (including regular users). Every user has a crontab (Cron Table) which is a list of tasks they want to run periodically. You do not edit this file manually: instead, you edit this table using the command '''crontab -e'''. Once you run the command, you will get an empty file where you have to insert a line like this:

'''Perform the following steps:'''