rsync - Sep 2006 - -x tries to descend into FUSE filesystems

Hi!

I've noticed that an "rsync -avx . host:/test" tries to descend
into a
FUSE filesystem (on the origin/sending side). This is at least true when
the FUSE is mounted by somebody else.

I came accross this while my nightly backup choked on this with
"Permission denied" at the mount point.

FUSE is a mount subsystem in Linux that enables userspace filesystems.
A FUSE mounted fs is normally not accessible by other users. - This is
to avoid trapping e.g. root in some system calls that are in fact in
control of the user who mounted the fs.


Here is what e.g. "ls" sees:

ls -la ~siemer/mnt/ 
total 20
drwxr-xr-x   4 siemer siemer  4096 2006-03-24 13:43 .
drwxr-xr-x 125 siemer siemer 12288 2006-09-05 10:32 ..
drwxr-xr-x   2 siemer siemer  4096 2006-03-24 13:43 cd
?---------   ? ?      ?          ?                ? /home/siemer/mnt/elf12


Is there a work around? <-:


Bye,
	Robert

On 9/5/06, Robert Siemer <Robert.Siemer-rsync@backsla.sh>
wrote:
> I've noticed that an "rsync -avx . host:/test" tries to
descend into a
> FUSE filesystem (on the origin/sending side). This is at least true when
> the FUSE is mounted by somebody else.
>
> I came accross this while my nightly backup choked on this with
> "Permission denied" at the mount point.
> [...]
> A FUSE mounted fs is normally not accessible by other users.
> [...]
> ?---------   ? ?      ?          ?                ? /home/siemer/mnt/elf12
All rsync sees is a directory that it is not allowed to stat.  (ls
can't stat it either; that's why you get question marks instead of
attributes.)  Rsync has no way of knowing that the directory is on
another filesystem because that information would be returned by the
stat.  Thus, I don't think there's any reasonable behavior other than
to complain, "Permission denied".

As a workaround, exclude the root of the FUSE with --exclude, and
you'll tickle the code path in flist.c that is commented "See if file
is excluded before reporting an error".

Matt