trendels

rsync daemon mode over ssh

There are several common ways to do rsync backups of hosts over ssh:

1. As a non-root user. Upsides: very secure. Downside: cannot back up sensitive files.
2. As root, with a public key. Downsides: Whoever has the private key has full root access to the host being backed up.
3. As root, with a public key and a "forced command". Upsides: Restricts access to the server. Downsides: Requires either careful matching of rsync options (which might change over time), or "validator" scripts. Neither idea sounds very appealing to me.
4. Running rsync in daemon mode on the host being backed up. Upsides: Lots of useful options, like read-only mode, running as a different user if required, server-side excludes/includes, etc. Downsides: Opens up a TCP port that has full filesystem read access and is hard to secure (Ideally you could make the rsync daemon use a unix socket instead, that could be secured by filesystem permissions, but I haven't found a way to do that).

Here is another option t

zed

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""Demo: use a socket as subprocesses stdin/stdout.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/19961290
"""
import socket
from contextlib import closing
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE

host = "stackoverflow.com"

addyosmani

Update May 2017

Eric Bidelman has documented some of the common workflows possible with headless Chrome over in https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/04/headless-chrome.

Update

If you're looking at this in 2016 and beyond, I strongly recommend investigating real headless Chrome: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkgr/headless/README.md

Windows and Mac users might find using Justin Ribeiro's Docker setup useful here while full support for these platforms is being worked out.