Rsync 2.6.9 does not skip any files based on modification time

[Matt McCutchen]

On Fri, 2008-02-08 at 10:59 +0100, Stefan Malte Schumacher wrote: 
> Thanks for the quick replies. I just added the -tO option as well as
> the -i option. 
> The output looks this way :
> <f..t..... Avalon/filename.gho> 
> After this rsync complains that it cannot set file names on
> "/Avalon/filename.gho" because the Operation is not permitted. The
> FAT-partition is mounted with " rw,user,nodev,nosuid,umask=000" so in
> theory everything the user stefan is able to - as whom rsync is doing
> file operations if I understand the uid-option correctly - should be
> possibly for rsync as well. Should I try to set the uid in the
> rsyncd.conf to root ? Is it possible that the chroot-option could
> cause this behavior ?

The trouble is that FAT does not store file ownership, so Linux shows
all the files on the partition as belonging to a single user and group,
by default root.  User stefan can create files due to the 777
permissions, but ownership of the files is immediately given to root,
which prevents stefan from setting their mtimes arbitrarily (since Linux
requires that a non-root user own a file in order to set its mtime
arbitrarily).

To work around this irritating incompatibility, you could set the uid in
rsyncd.conf to root, or (safer) you could mount the partition with the
"uid=stefan" mount option to make all the files owned by stefan.

Matt