Connecting two rsync clients

[George Hazlewood]

Hi,

Firstly a quick intro, I'm a web developer/linux admin who's trying to setup automated backups for a client. I really like the look of rsync and I know it'll do what I want if I can get it to ;)

I've spent some time playing with rsync trying to get it to do what I want but I keep getting stumped. The situation is simple, webserver (master) with various files that need backing up (usual config files, a tar of the dbs on the machine, and all the html gubbins). The destination machine, a remote (i.e. off network, backup) machine which I have shell access to which is purely used for backups. I want to set rsync to run from cron daily to backup any changed files to the remote machine so that should anything disasterous happen, e.g. client stupidity, I can recover files.

I'd assumed after reading the docs that I would be able to do a client->client backup. I don't have access to setup rsyncd on the remote machine so I tried connecting two clients. Am I correct in trying this? All the work is done from the master machine (running the rsync client from cron) and files to backup are pushed at the backup machine. That's what I thought anyway. I tried using the following shell to make things easier to change and run.

<snip>

/usr/local/bin/rsync -vcrlnptgoxRz --delete -e ssh \
--include-from=/usr/local/rsync/include.conf \
--exclude-from=/usr/local/rsync/exclude.conf --stats --progress \
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf \
/home/bind/etc/ \
/usr/local/mysql_backup/currentbackup.tar.gz \
/home/httpd/hosts \
/etc/opt/awstats /var/cache/awstats \
george@<remotemachinehere>.com:/home/george/backup/

</snip>

And running that gets this:

building file list ...
xxx files to consider
ERROR: destination must be a directory when copying more than 1 file
rsync error: errors selecting input/output files, dirs (code 3) at main.c(274)
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (8 bytes read so far)
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(150)
./rsync.sh: george@<remotemachinehere>.com:/home/george/backup/: No such file or directory


Assuming that client to client doesn't work can I do server->client where the client pulls the data from the server (on the master machine)?

I think I've confused myself too much, I've been trying to do it in a hurry which is never good.

Can anyone help explain where I'm going wrong please?

Thanks in advance

George



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