> 
> How do people normally use this account (with ssh) to perform this?
> 
> On one pair of machines I've given operator a shell of /bin/sh, left his
> home dir as /, and created /.ssh/ and /.ssh/authorized_keys.  That
> works, but is there some cleaner and/or safer way that I'm missing?
> Maybe one that doesn't require giving that account a valid shell?
> (While still using ssh of course.)  I would like to make it as
> restrictive as possible while still being able to get the job done.

If you're using 'ssh' because you want to encrypt the network backups,
you could probably rig up some encrypted tunnels with 'stunnel', and
you wouldn't have to give 'operator' a valid shell.  If you just
want to do network backups without 'rsh', consider 'amanda'.  I use
amanda and IPSEC.

David S.