this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I have a server that has multiple services running under multiple users that each store data. I want to be able to bundle all this data up and send it to another server for backups.
At a high level, how do I manage permissions for this? Currently I run the backup as root, then chown it to a special backups user which can log in through ssh. But this all feels clunky to me.
There are many ways to do this, but the next up from users is using groups!
For each file or data directory, create a group that owns it. This group should have the service's user as member. Then create a user for running the backups, and add it to all these groups.
The benefit of this is you don't have to use root, and you have an association of directory to group that you can always change. You can for example grant a user access to a data directory by just adding it to its group.