Setting up Duplicity with GnuPG

Really enjoy the functionality of Duplicity. On CentOS:

sudo yum install duplicity

If you get "No package duplicity available.", you need to install EPEL. For CentOS 6:

sudo rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

Then try yum again.

To make a key using GnuPG:

gpg --gen-key

The defaults are fine. When the key is complete, make sure you copy down the key (made bold) because you'll pass it to duplicity:

gpg: checking the trustdb

gpg: 3 marginal(s) needed, 1 complete(s) needed, PGP trust model

gpg: depth: 0 valid: 1 signed: 0 trust: 0-, 0q, 0n, 0m, 0f, 1u

pub 2048R/12345678 2012-01-26

.....

You might need to export the key if another user will use it. In my case, I had to create the keys with one user but another user would execute the backups.

gpg --output secret --export-secret-keys

gpg --output public --export

Then the other user needs to:

gpg --import /path/to/secret

gpg --import /path/to/public

You can verify the keys are there by:

gpg --list-keys

If when using the key you get these errors:

gpg: : There is no assurance this key belongs to the named user

gpg: [stdin]: sign+encrypt failed: Unusable public key

You should (as the user experiencing this error):

gpg --edit-key [key]

> trust

// decide how much to trust it

> save

Now to actually use duplicity, it'll most likely be cron'd so a shell script would work nice. I like the way Justin Hartman did it so there's really no need to re-invent what he did. Just ignore the AWS stuff if you're not backing up there.

Issues with new NIC on Centos 6.0 server

A Dell Poweredge went down with an E1410 error which I couldn't clear. The Motherboard/NIC had to be replaced. This resolved the error but brought about an annoying networking situation.

I really like this nixCraft Howto for Red Hat simple networking issues. After putting the new MAC address on the HWADDR line in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1 (just added 1 to eth0's MAC addr), I ran "/etc/init.d/network restart" expecting everything to come up. No such luck - got Fatal "Device eth0 does not seem to be present" errors. Verified the MAC address, swapped the addresses between eth0 and eth1, restarted the server, no joy.

Eventually someone smarter than me to me to look at eth2 and eth3. Turns out the NIC card was binding to eth3. To resolve this, I commented out the HWADDR line in ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1 and restarted the server. Running "ifconfig eth0" showed the NIC now attached to eth0. I wanted this to always be the case so now I uncommented the HWADDR line in ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1 and restarted again. I probably could have just restarted network not the server and got the same results but everything was good.