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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