Hello,
I’m trying to setup a filesystem backup in webmin to an FTP server. I am provided this FTP server via my dedicated server provider and the username is my hostname of the server…so is in this format jk678564.provider.com
Webmin doesn’t seem to like the ‘dots’ in the username…is there a way round this? My provider doesn’t give you the option to change your username, its default set at your domain name.
Thank you Christian
Howdy,
Virtualmin actually uses dots in all of it’s FTP usernames by default… in theory, that those should be a valid character for usernames for an FTP server in Webmin/Virtualmin.
What sorts of problems are you seeing exactly?
-Eric
Thank you for the reply…
I’m having the problem when I select ftp option in the filesystem backup…I put in the ftp address, username and password. Proceed with the backup and the progress comes on the screen with the various things its doing, and it flags up saying the username is incorrect format (sorry I don’t remember exact message, I will look when I get home and reply with the exact message)… If I use a username that doesn’t have an . symbol in… And it says incorrect password (obviously as the username doesn’t exist)
I appreciate your help.
Christian
Here is the exact message I am receiving
Performing backup of / to *****SERVERNAME:/ …
dump: invalid user name servername.domain.com
When I enter a username with no dots in…i get this…
DUMP: Connection to ******SERVERNAME established.
DUMP: Date of this level 0 dump: Tue Aug 2 00:05:31 2011
DUMP: Dumping /dev/sda1 (/) to / on host ******SERVERNAME
DUMP: Label: /
DUMP: Writing 10 Kilobyte records
DUMP: mapping (Pass I) [regular files]
DUMP: mapping (Pass II) [directories]
DUMP: estimated 2396391 blocks.
FTP login failed : PASS *********** failed : Login authentication failed
DUMP: /: FTP login failed : PASS *********** failed : Login authentication failed
DUMP: Cannot open output “/”: Operation not permitted
As you can see, when i enter a username with dots i get the error message invalid username (by the way, this is the entire output message) and when i enter a username with no dots i get login auth failed.
I have replaced real servername with *****SERVERNAME for obvious reasons.
Thank you for the help!
The error you’re seeing suggests that it’s the “dump” command that’s struggling with that username.
I’m curious if using tar-style backups, rather than “dump”, would solve your problem.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that’s an option that can just be tweaked, it looks like you’ll need to re-create the filesystem backup.
But when you do so, before you click “Add new backup of directory”, click the “Tar Format” checkbox to the right of that.
If you do that, do your filesystem backups work as expected?
-Eric
Thank you! This works perfect. I think you were right, the dump command is having problems with my user name as the ‘Tar’ backup works fine.
If I select ‘yes’ on ‘Just add new files to archive?’ will this just do a differential backup and only add the files that are new (that aren’t in the original full backup)
Thank you
Regards
Christian
It will, but you can’t use it via FTP:
Just add new files to archive?
“When this is set to No (as it is by default), the backup destination will be replaced with an archive of all files currently in the source directories. But if you select Yes, only files that have been changed since the archive was create will be appended to it. This is useful when making incremental backups. However, it cannot be used with compressed or remote archives.”
I think so, but I haven’t experimented with that option before 
But yeah, from the sound of it, it would add any file created since the last filesystem backup ran.
-Eric