Howdy,
A while ago it occurred to me that adding a little "glue"
subsystem one could make life much easier for all those
people who often need to combine ssh & rsync to update or
mirror something efficiently and securely over the net.
So, I came up with three little programs
- ssync-server - an sshd subsystem running rsync in server mode
- ssync-client - an ssh wrapper that gets ssh options right
- ssync - an rsync wrapper which launches rsync -e ssync-client
The latter two could probably be combined in one ssync binary,
but it seemed to be easier to manage the argument lists properly
when done separately like this.
If the openssh team is willing to distribute these as part of
the openssh package, I could donate them.
With just a few lines of extra code one gets full the combined
power of two excellent packages which are both already so big
that combining them for real would be approaching brain damage
(or should I say mind rot in this case).
Compared to running "rsync -e ssh yadda yadda" manually from
the command line ssync subsystem gets rid of an unnecessary
shell process on the server side and avoids some fumbling
with the command line options on the clients side.
This may be underlining the obvious, but still... One uses ssync
exactly the same as plain rsync but without the complication
of getting the remote shell program right. In fact ssync simply
ignores any "-e rshprog" options.
I hope you like the idea.
// jau
