rsync - May 2006 - Debian upgrade and rsync changes.

I've finally been given the go-ahead to upgrade from Woody to Sarge. I
am comparing rsync man pages to try to determine what effects a change
from 2.5.7 (protocol 26) -> 2.6.4 (protocol 29) may have.

We have ~1000 rsync clients (also at 2.5.7) maintaining their entire
filesystem from one server. I plan to upgrade the server first, and then
the clients.

This is an example rsync command we use:

  rsync --timeout 150 
        --port 443
        --password-file /etc/little_password
        --exclude-from /local_mirror/netpost/etc/rsync_remote_list
        --partial
        --delete
        -z -a -v 
       $info{machine_name}\@$info{logging_host}::$image /local_mirror

The basic gist is that a script will periodically perform these rsyncs,
syncing a 'local mirror' against a remote image, and only when an rsync
has completed successfully (and made changes) will the live filesystem
be synced against this local mirror. This is due to the unreliable
nature of theses client's internet connections.

The man page shows new --delete options - particularly reference is made
to --delete-during being more efficient than --delete. Is this likely to
be a desirable parameter change for us?

There seems to have been a lot of activity around the include/exclude
type features. However, as far as I can see the basic functionality does
not appear to have changed. That is, a simple list of +/- files in a
--exclude-from file would still be interpreted in the same way?

cheers,
Mike

On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 02:57:44PM +0800, Mike Daws
wrote:
> The man page shows new --delete options - particularly reference is made
> to --delete-during being more efficient than --delete. Is this likely to
> be a desirable parameter change for us?
Yes, I recommend --delete-during for those that don't need --delete-after
functionality.  It gets more and more efficient the larger the file-set
gets (since larger file-sets can't fit in the OS's directory cache, and
--delete-during eliminates a separate pass through the hierarchy).
> There seems to have been a lot of activity around the include/exclude
> type features. However, as far as I can see the basic functionality does
> not appear to have changed.
Yes, that is right.  The only user-visible changes in some obscure patterns
(which were fixed to work correctly) are listed at the head of the bug-fix
list in the changes for 2.6.0.  If any of your patters are affected by the
changes (which is unlikely), there is provided a correct way to phrase the
pattern that works in all versions of rsync.

Most of the improvements to the including and excluding of files (such as
the ability to separate an exclude's hiding of files on the sender from
its protecting of files on the receiver) were added as a separate option,
--filter, in order to make rsync as backward-compatible as possible.

You may want to also check into the --partial-dir option, which is a safer
means of providing --partial functionality because it does not ever over-
write a destination file with a partial (or corrupt) transfer.

..wayne..