On Mon, Dec 03, 2001 at 01:21:29PM -0800, Sri Ramkrishna
wrote:> I have a question regarding how rsync changes ownership when syncing two
> areas. Currently, I have this situation:
>
> I have two areas over a WAN, we are trying to mirror from one site to
> another. One site is not controlled by us and has different unix
> groups.
>
> When we copy one to the other, we are running rsync on an account that
> exists at both places (different UIDs though) In one area we have no
> problems the groups/owners exist at both places. However in another
> area, the owner exists but the group name does not.
>
> When we run rsync between the two we get a lot of chown errors. Now
> this makes sense as some OSs (we are using HPUX 11) do not allow a
> person to change the ownership of a file. However, we have another area
> where both the group and the ownership exist on both ends but we have no
> chown errors. Can anybody explain this behavior? In the end, the area
> still gets owned by the uid and gid of the rsync running on our end.
>
> Thanks,
> sri
Are you using rsync --daemon mode on one side? There are several tricky
issues related to that, alluded to under the "--owner" option in the
rsync man page.
What user id are you doing the transfers under?
Also, rsync enforces bsd-style ownership and group semantics, regardless of
whether or not the underlying operating system permits more freedom with
chown and chgrp. That means it won't allow doing a chown to another user
if you're not root, and the only groups it will allow a non-privileged
user to chgrp to are those which groups which the user belongs to.
- Dave Dykstra