Strange file locking behaviour

[Paul Slootman]

On Thu 28 Sep 2006, Aaron Hawryluk wrote:
> 
> Bit of a sticky situation - we use rsync to mirror files from a remote
> staging server to our development server (both on Linux).  The mirroring
> works fine, however, while the rsync process is running, our apache service
> on the destination system can't access the files.  Is rsync locking the
> destination file system while it checks the files or something? Anyone got
> any idea how I could get around this? My only other option at this stage is
> to try to use Volume Shadow Copy across networks, and that doesn't sound
> like fun.

rsync shouldn't do anything exciting like locking.
Even during updates apache should always find a correct file,
as rsync does a rename() of the temporary new file to the real file,
so that accesses will find either the old file or the new file; nothing
in between.

At work we use rsync to keep a redundant webserver up to date with
everything, and there have never been complaints of files not being
accessable.

What errors does apache give? It's always helpful to give as much info
as possible (you don't even mention what version rsync is used on both
ends, for example, or the command lines used).


Paul Slootman