rsync not updating files even with checksum flag

[Jason Haar]

Mark Osborne wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am having a problem with rsync that I hope someone can help me
> figure out.  We are using rsync to sync up files between our staging
> and production ftp servers.  Basically internal users are allowed to
> upload files via a samba share to a staging server.  Those files are
> then synced out every 15 minutes via cron to our production ftp servers.
>
> The problem occurs when a large file is being upload from a windows
> machine via the samba share.  If a rsync is instantiated during the
> time that the file is being uploaded the destination machines get the
> file with the correct filesize and timestamp.  Unfortunately, even
> though the file shows the correct size it is not a good copy of the
> file.  An md5sum of the files on both the source and destination
> machine returns different results.  I believe this occurs because
> windows automatically "reserves" the full size of the file and fills
> it out with 0s and then overwrites this as it goes along copying.
>  This wouldn't be a big deal except, subsequent runs of rsync (even
> with -c) fail to overwrite the file.
>

You could do what we do. We use "smbstatus" first to check that there
are no SMB locks present (on files only - you can ignore the ones on
dirs), then rename the new files out to a staging dir - then rsync that
instead. It guarantees the files have been finished, and even lets the
Windows users know the files have been picked up (as they disappear)


-- 
Cheers

Jason Haar
Information Security Manager, Trimble Navigation Ltd.
Phone: +64 3 9635 377 Fax: +64 3 9635 417
PGP Fingerprint: 7A2E 0407 C9A6 CAF6 2B9F 8422 C063 5EBB FE1D 66D1