= INVESTIGATION 2: ADDITIONAL ESSENTIAL SKILLS / BACKUPS =

The default (and often the only) way to administer a linux server is via SSH. Even in your case where you have a direct console to all your VM screens you may find it helpful to connect to your virtual machines using SSH (if nothing else - you can resize the terminal window).

'''Your task ===:''' For this lab you have to set up password-less login for the root user on the host to the root user on each of the VMs.

Rsync is a very versatile backup tool. As the name suggests it's used for synchronising files typically across a network. It works over the SSH protocol so if you have ssh working - you can use rsync as well.

Create a new file in vm1's /etc/ directory, and rerun rsync. Notice that only that file gets copied over.

Cron is a daemon - a program that runs in the background. It's role is to run tasks periodically. It can run tasks for the system or for a user (any user). We'll get cron to run some backup scripts for us, but first let's see how it works.