Message-ID: <4B15EC8B.8060701@tlinx.org>
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:26:51 -0800
From: Linda Walsh <cygwin AT tlinx DOT org>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20090812 Lightning/0.9 Thunderbird/2.0.0.23 ThunderBrowse/3.2.6.8 Mnenhy/0.7.6.666
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: rsync pull problem and possible solution
References: <26319757 DOT post AT talk DOT nabble DOT com> <4B09E739 DOT 6050402 AT tlinx DOT org> <26477154 DOT post AT talk DOT nabble DOT com>
In-Reply-To: <26477154.post@talk.nabble.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm
Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com
Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com

Linda Walsh previously wrote:
>>    Dunno about the rest, but I rsync from a mounted MS-Windows
				  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>CIFS share every night to a linux server.  It's never hung.  So I
>>don't know
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>about the 'well known' part.  Maybe there's a special way to get it to
>>hang that I'm not using...  But, FYI, pulling from a MSWin Share does
>>work.
		^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


grkuntzmd wrote:
> Are you using "push" or "pull"? In other words, are you running rsync
> on the Windows host and sending to the Linux host, or are you running
> rsync on the Linux host and retrieving files from the Window machine?
> It is the latter that hangs.
----


Wasn't my text clear enough? I have a mounted (not something you usually
do in Windows) CIFS share (that's a Linux mount type, not something you
	specify in Windows), that I rsync from -- last sentence 'pull
	from MSWin Share', TO a linux server.  I run it on a cron job.
	Cron's never hung.

No.  It doesn't hang under normal circumstances.  I don't use 'ssh'.  I
use NTFSv2 authentication (available with XP-SP2 and above and Samba
(don't know when it was added, but it's in 3.4).  I use "user Security",
not "share level security", so it's mounted by root using my personal
credentials, since I'm the primary admin on the machine.  I switched to
using 'pull' backups, because using rsync on Windows (under cygwin) was
unreliable at the time (was using 1.5).  1.5 couldn't read the many
unicode filenames that get stored by firefox.  Explorer could't read
many of the files because it only had access to Unicode planes up
through maybe '5' (out of something like 13 or so) in XP.  But the files
were readable from linux. They are also readable on Win7 as it seems to
have unicode support for all the planes I've encountered.

Second problem on XP was reliability of MS's task scheduler.  It often
would just stop running for no good reason and would not give any
messages about it anyplace where I'd see them.  First indication would
be when I 'd do a locate and see my file database was over 11 days old
(or wherever the warning is set to).  I'd simply go back into the task
scheduler and retype in my password (which hadn't changed, but somehow
it would 'lose' it on a regular basis). Then it would work again for
some unspecified time -- sometimes several weeks, but usually less.

So linux pull was much more robust as cron will complain if something
goes wrong.  I would miss locked files (NTUSER.DAT), or the filefox
/tbird files if I had those progs open, but it just skipped by them.
Never had 1 hang.

I use SuSE, as a distro.  Maybe your distro or kernel is broken?

Also, FWIW, I couldn't use ntbackup on XP -- it would crash whenever it tried
to save system state.  I could save the entire disk, but not system state.

To save my registry, I enumerated the mounted hives with a shell script and
saved each hive in both UTF16 and UTF8 format (UTF8 mostly so I could 
grep it if I wanted to search for something).  I did do a restore from my
reg-files one time.  It worked fairly well -- well enough to get me back 
up and running, though I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a perfect mechanism,
as I simply pulled in my saved values on top of the existing (corrupt) 
registry).  So I ended up with crap in the registry, but the necessary
values were re-initialized to good values, so I was able to get back
up and running, which was the most important thing for me at the time
(and I wonder why my system is occasionally flakey...:-).

But hanging, when rsyncing, I was using (I haven't started on Win7 yet... as 
it seems to be able to do backups):

   rsync --no-blocking-io --acls -avxASH -8 --fake-super \
     --delete-delay "$src" "$dst"

Win7's backups are a bit deficient.  MS expects you to reinstall windows and
all your programs from scratch if you need to do a full system restore.  
By default they don't backup /program* and won't even offer you the option
of backing up /windows.  So no 'image' backups using win utils.

   On the positive side -- all the files it DOES backp are now in zip
format -- and if one wants, one can unzip all the files each night and do
differentials and put them in a separate location (as MS doesn't do differentials,
it only stores them in one location, though it may keep some previous versions of
files -- dunno.  Like most MS products, it's not well documented.

I may be able to use cygwin 1.7 to do push backups again -- as it understands
unicode, but I may still have problems with scheduling reliability.  Win7 isn't
very reliable about anything.

A better option would be to get 'ustar' working on windows.  It stores ACLS and 
external file attrs in a tar file format.  But I should be able to run it
from linux with the file system as a cifs mount.

-l


--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple