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