rsync - Aug 2008 - rsync operation times out on excluded directory

Hello list,

I have the following problem for awhile now. A backup script is running on
server Backup. Every night a complete backup of /home is made of server Server,
using rsync over SSH. (rsync version 3.0.2 on Debian/Linux)

Now. There is one user, that has a NFS mount in his homedirectory on Server
"/home/username/mnt". This user uses NFS to access his laptop's
filesystem. At
night the laptop is not connected, so the mountpoint is not accessible:

    root@server:~# mount
    10.0.0.217:/Users/username/Development on /home/username/mnt/dev (nfs)


To prevent errors with rsync, I exclude the directory, using this option:
--exclude=/home/username/mnt

However, even though I exclude this directory, rsync still attempts to access
it:

2008/08/06 01:05:41 [23001] receiving file list
2008/08/06 01:27:44 [23001] rsync: readlink "/home/username/mnt/dev"
failed:
Operation timed out (60)
2008/08/06 01:34:57 [23001] IO error encountered -- skipping file deletion

The manpage says that using the exclude option, will prevent it from traversing
beneith an exclude-path.

Since I exclude /home/username/mnt, howcome it times out on
/home/username/mnt/dev?

Is there a solution? Other than lazy-unmounting the NFS filesystem?

-- 
Rob klein Gunnewiek
BWSS B.V. Deventer (http://www.bwss.nl)
Tel +(31) 0570-665140
Fax +(31) 0570-665141

On Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 10:53:34AM +0200, Rob klein Gunnewiek
wrote:
> However, even though I exclude this directory, rsync still attempts to
> access it:
Yes, this has come up before.  The current exclude code wants to know in
advance if the items is a directory so that it knows which rules apply
to the name and which don't.  Because of that rsync, will stat every
file before checking to see if it is excluded.  If the exclude code was
rewritten to take a name and return two results, one for dirs and one
for non-dirs, then the name could be excluded prior to a stat call
anytime that the two results agreed on exclusion.  I'm going to look
into such an implementation and possibly include it in 3.1.0.

In the meantime, there your options are: (1) exclude the parent dir
of the mount (/home/username/mnt), which will prevent rsync from ever
trying to stat the mount itself, (2) change the current mount to a
symlink to a mount, and move the actual mount to a place where you can
exclude its parent directory, or (3) create a way for the laptop-user
to unmount that mount prior to leaving and remount after arriving.

..wayne..