tricky rsync setup quit working

[Peter Daum]

Hi,

some time ago I had started working on a rsync-based backup system.
After I longer break; I now tried to continue this project but can't
get it to work anymore. Maybe somebody here has any idea. The basic
setup looks like this:

client:
$rsync $rsync_opts --rsh="'ssh -i $ssh_key'" $filesystems $bak_host::backup_module/path

on the server side, the ssh key triggered a shell script that generated
a configuration like

[backup_module]
path=/some/path
use chroot=1
...

and eventually invoked rsync with the command line:
rsync --daemon --no-detach --config $cfg_file

Back then, this setup actually worked: rsync read the configuration
file and started its work using the ssh-tunneled network connection.
In the syslog, this looked like this:
rsyncd: connect from UNKNOWN (localhost)
rsyncd: rsync to backup_module/hostname from UNKNOWN (localhost)
...
Now the same setup just causes rsync to listen on a new network socket

After looking through the documentation and digging in the rsync sources,
it doesn't look like this could ever work, but thrust me - it did!
(It looks like the only way to get rsync to honor the configuration file
is to specify --daemon, which causes it to listen on the network instead
of doing its work and the only way to do it's job on the existing network
connection is to specify "--server", in which case it doesn't honor the
configuration file. Unfortunately, some options like chroot can only be
specified via configuration file)

Unfortunately, I can't figure out what changed in the meantime that broke
this setup, Does anybody have an idea?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Peter Daum