daemon excludes all my files

[Timothy Madden]

On 9/24/06, Matt McCutchen <hashproduct+rsync at gmail.com> wrote:
> The trouble is that your .* exclude pattern is matching . , the top
> level of the module, because * can match the empty string:
>
> > skipping server-excluded file "."
>
> If your intent was to match hidden files, change the pattern to .?* to
> match a period followed by at least one character.
>
> Are you sure you need to use daemon excludes?  They are meant as a
> security policy to prevent clients from accessing or uploading files
> at excluded paths.  If you only want to skip uploading some of the
> files in the source directory, get rid of the daemon excludes and use
> only the client excludes (on the command line).  This will also fix
> the problem because rsync never allows . to be affected by client
> excludes.
>
> It's not clear to me whether daemon excludes should match the top
> level of a module or whether the behavior is a bug, since the
> documentation of the daemon exclude settings in rsyncd.conf(5) is
> inadequate.  I am left wondering what the meanings of "- /foo", "-/
> foo", and "-/ /foo" are for a daemon and how to exclude a file at a
> certain path from the root of the module (as opposed to the transfer
> or the filesystem).  I tried to figure this out from the source code,
> but the filter-matching code is really difficult to understand.
> Wayne, please help!

The documentation is good enough in general, but for some particular
cases like this one it is not enough. However rsync is still a sound
application from what I can see. Although I have seen bugs, at least
in the cygwin port that I use, it is still pretty functional and helps
me.

deamon excludes are of course a security policy and that is exactly
why the should be used instead of relying on the client, which is less
trusted that the server. Anyway in my configuration both client and
server are in the internal network, and only admin and devs can use
it. I use VPN on Win32 for network access, and once I'm connected with
VPN, I have all the rights I need.

My problem is not related to the excludes though, be them server-side
or client-side. I commented the exclude line in rsyncd.conf, and I
have also used the client with no excludes on the command-line. I got
the same result, with all my files listed as being excluded by the
server :(. What I did not try is to restart the deamon after changing
the rsyncd.conf, and I won't do it soon because I do not have any more
time for this. I will just have to rsync one file at a time, as I'm
working on them

See you
Timothy Madden
Romania