Hi there,

I have a behavior I do not understand concerning a backup we are doing using rsync.

Basically the command we are using to do the backup is the following:

The script works OK and gather the data from the server.

The problem I am having is that: in the backed up data, the uid and gid are root.root whereas it should not be.
For instance the /etc/nagios2 folder does not have the correct permissions.

So I have tried to manually transfer the /etc/nagios2 folder using the exact same syntax and ... the uid/gid are all OK.

I do not understand and I have already spend a part of my day working on it...

If you need any more information please let me know.

Thank you very much in advance for your kind help!

Cheers...
G.

Hi all,

I do not mean to be a pain but having a point of view or some help would be really nice to help me troubleshoot the problem...

Thanks in advance!

Gael

What user are you running the script as and the manual command? the -o and -g options (both implied by -a) require root.

Edit - who is $USERNAME as well

try to add
to preserve the file timestamps and permissions

They are both implied by -a as well

First of all, thanks for your replies

The cron is run by the user: root

The manual command I am using is the same as the one I am using in cron.

$USERNAME=root


One more precision I am writing the backup on a Samba share (to be more precise, this is a Windows share mounted using CIFS).

So does the source even have linux ownerships? I assume that you are running the manual command as uid/gid? Try running it manually as root - I suspect you'll get the cron result.

Well when the command is run manually (as root) the permissions and ownership are all good.
But as soon as cron runs it, everything is owned by root and the permissions are 777 on folders and rwxrwSrwt on files...

How did you enter it into cron?
Both the source and remote usernames must be root for all permissions to be saved. If the source user is not root then some files will not be able to be read. If the dest user is not then it will not be able to set permissions & ownership on the destination of anything the user does not own.

This is your problem.

A windows filesystem has no concept of "Ownership" or "Group".

So when you retrieve the files from your windows filesystem, linux doesn't know who they should belong to, so they are assigned to root.

If you want to use rsync make sure the destination for the backup is a linux filesystem.

If you used tar to make to backup your files, you could save the resulting .tgz file to a windows filesystem, and permissions, groups etc. would be intact when you untarred it, because that's the way tar works.

Hmm, really? Sure, if it's FAT. But NTFS has some concept of that; I use cygwin on Windows (NTFS drives) after all.

Here is the cron.
Then the backup script contains the rsync command...

30 18 * * * root cd /root/backupscripts/; ./backup.xen01.sh;

So why does it work when I run it manually? The permissions and ownership are all OK...


Good idea for tar (or maybe star), if this rsync thingy is still causing me trouble, I will take this solution...

Cheers
G.

Hi all,

Do you have any more idea about this problem?

Please let me know. Much appreciate!

Gael

I am getting confused here. Please check these statements very carefully:

You are using a script to rsync files to a windows partition and then you later copy them back to linux.

When you run the backup script from a cron job, it fails to restore groups and ownerships ( and permissions? )when the files are copied from the windows filesystem back to linux.

When you run the script as (which user?) what was the exact command you used? [ history may help you here ] then the files are copied to the windows filesystem and then can be restored to the linux filesystem, and the groups and ownerships ( and permissions? ) are correct (I think this is not possible, but stand to be corrected, and don't have an NTFS filesystem to play with).

- * -

Now some Qs:

Please post your backup.xen01.sh script.

Where did you "transfer the /etc/nagios2 folder" to? Was it a windows filesystem or a linux one?

While you think about those statements and Qs, please try some experiments:

As the user yourself create a directory in your username's home and put some files in it.

Try setting the permissions of the files in that directory to something strange like 733

As root, rsync that directory (belonging to the user yourself) to the windows filesystem.

Now restore it to root's home directory (/root) as the user root.

Is it still marked as being owned by yourself, or root?

Are the file permissions the same?