backups?

[Tony Reeves]

The enviroment:
We have several SCO 386 machines in a building not to far away. They are
connected via ethernet to a company backbone. We have a large Sequent with
lots of storage located in a different building, also connected to the
backbone.

Problem: Allowing the Sequent to store backups of the SCO harddisk. The local
SCO machines DO NOT have any tape units. Therefore to backup we need to use
the Sequent as a place to do a disk to disk copy. SCO does not support rdump
or dump. They support tar and cpio. 

Statement: To allow SCO to do a full level 0 dump, you must be superuser and
use tar to do a backup. If you are a normal or admin user some directorys and
files cannot be tar'ed because only root has read access. Normally the
following command will do the job:
tar cvnAf - / | compress -c | rcmd hacgate dd of=/dump/sco/tarfile.Z

this will do a full system dump of the SCO system and compress it then write
the file to the Sequent machines disk (the Sequent is called hacgate).

However, to do this, the Sequent must have .rhosts setup to know the sco
system (in this case lets call the SCO system helen).

Now if .rhost is set for helen, then helen can logon to hacgate as root, or
have access to hacgate as a root account. We don't like this. 

Question:
Is there an easy way to allow root to do a tar of the system, pipe it to a
user account, then allow the user to pipe it to hacgate? Thereby the root does
not have access to hacgate directly. Does anyone have an idea how I can get an
normal user account or admin account to read root files for backup? 

Any experenced SCO people please help. Thanks,