This is a howto describing an unattended installation of Cygwin including both Rsyncd and SSHD. Rsyncd is there to make your backup setup from the BackupPC server more simplified. No setting up SMB shares or any business, just use one master rsyncd.conf file with all of your shares for all of your servers and you're in business. The sshd is intended to allow you to execute remote commands. This can be useful if you want to dump a database or setup a VSC to pull from instead of being denied access to open files. Relavent links can be found at the bottom of this howto.

• A central share to store all of your files - should be heavily but properly guarded
• Administrative rights and the ability to use psexec to run commands on the remote server

This is the script that does most of the heavy lifting. It's copied to and executed on the remote host. The quick rundown of what it does are as follows:

1. Copy entire install directory to a local path
2. Setup cygwin including the necessary packages for rsyncd and sshd
3. Prerequisite junk
4. Setup SSH daemon
5. Open necessary firewall ports
6. Copy rsyncd config files to /etc directory
7. Start SSH daemon
8. Create then rsyncd windows service
9. Cleanup

cygwin_install.cmd

mkdir C:\cygwin_install
copy /Y \\fileserver\cygwin_install C:\cygwin_install
 
C:\cygwin_install\setup-x86_64.exe -q -D -s http://mirrors.xmission.com/cygwin -l C:\cygwin64 -L C:\cygwin64 -P base-cygwin,wget,git,git-svn,openssh,cygrunsrv,rsync
C:\cygwin64\bin\mkpasswd.exe -l > C:\cygwin64\etc\passwd
C:\cygwin64\bin\mkgroup.exe -l > C:\cygwin64\etc\group
C:\cygwin64\bin\bash.exe --login -c "/usr/bin/chown :Domain\ Users /var"
C:\cygwin64\bin\bash.exe --login -c "/usr/bin/chmod 755 /var"
C:\cygwin64\bin\bash.exe --login -c "/usr/bin/chmod ug-s /var"
C:\cygwin64\bin\bash.exe --login -c "/bin/ssh-host-config -y -w somestrongpassword"
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=SSH dir=in action=allow protocol=tcp localport=22
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=rsyncd dir=in action=allow protocol=tcp localport=873
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMP echoreq" action=allow protocol=icmpv4:8,any dir=in
copy C:\cygwin_install\rsyncd.conf C:\cygwin64\etc\rsyncd.conf
copy C:\cygwin_install\rsyncd.secrets C:\cygwin64\etc\rsyncd.secrets
net start sshd
setx path "c:\cygwin64\bin;%path%"
c:\cygwin64\bin\cygrunsrv.exe --install "rsyncd" --path C:/cygwin64/bin/rsync.exe --args "--daemon --no-detach" --desc "Starts a rsync daemon for accepting incoming rsync connections" --disp "Rsync Daemon" --type auto
net start rsyncd
 
del /Q C:\cygwin_install
rmdir C:\cygwin_install

This is just a psexec launcher. Very straightforward and worthless:

doit.cmd

.\psexec.exe \\%1 -e -s -c cygwin_install.cmd

So when it's time to “do it” you will just `.\doit hostname`

I shouldn't need to help you with this, but this file is going to be required eventually, so here is a sample:

rsyncd.conf

gid = 544
uid = 18
use chroot = false
transfer logging = true
log format = %h %o %f %l %b
log file = /var/log/rsyncd.log
max connections = 1
pid file = /var/run/rsyncd.pid
lock file = /var/run/rsyncd.lock
 
[cDrive]
 path = /cygdrive/c
 comment = Entire C Drive
 auth users = backuppc
 secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.secrets
 hosts allow = backuppc_ip
 strict modes = false
 read only = true
 list = false
 
[CompanyShare]
 path = /cygdrive/d/MyCompany
 comment = Maybe useful for a shared fileserver for your entire company
 auth users = backuppc
 secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.secrets
 hosts allow = backuppc_ip
 strict modes = false
 read only = true
 list = false
 
 [dbbackups]
 path = /cygdrive/c/dbbackups
 comment = Microsoft SQL Server backups
 auth users = backuppc
 secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.secrets
 hosts allow = backuppc_ip
 strict modes = false
 read only = true
 list = false

This is also required, at least it is using the rsync config specified above:

rsyncd.secrets

# Also: make sure this file ends in a newline.  Otherwise the last
# username/password pair will be ignored.
#
#UUU:PPP
 
 
backuppc:backuppcpasswordfromserver

This file is optional, but useful for updating your server(s) without going through the entire install process again:

update.cmd

.\psexec.exe \\%1 -e -s -c rsyncd_update.cmd

Called like doit.cmd - add a hostname after

The meat and potatoes called when the helper above is used:

rsyncd_update.cmd

mkdir C:\cygwin_install
copy /Y \\fileserver\cygwin_install C:\cygwin_install
 
copy C:\cygwin_install\rsyncd.conf C:\cygwin64\etc\rsyncd.conf
copy C:\cygwin_install\rsyncd.secrets C:\cygwin64\etc\rsyncd.secrets
net stop rsyncd
net start rsyncd
 
del /Q C:\cygwin_install
rmdir C:\cygwin_install

Yes - this is just a trimmed down version of the other command file.

I keep a working copy of this directory on a workstation of mine to call it from. Really most of the scripts don't need to be pulled down by the remote host, basically just the cygwin setup file and the rsyncd config files. It's easiest to just keep everything together though. Alternatively, if you can get to a command prompt on the fileserver you can just run doit and/or update from there.

Here is the addendum for dbbackups
Here is the addendum for enabling Volume Shadow Copies