fileflags, hardlinks and FreeBSD

Jonathan Call jcall at verio.net
Wed Sep 22 10:28:44 MDT 2010


I have an rsync daemon running on a FreeBSD 7.3 system. It is running
rsync 3.0.4 with fileflags enabled. I have the following six files on it
which are all hardlinks and have the immutable flag set:

6830483 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   schg  33268 Jan  6  2005 chfn
6830483 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   schg  33268 Jan  6  2005 chpass
6830483 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   schg  33268 Jan  6  2005 chsh
6830483 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   schg  33268 Jan  6  2005 ypchfn
6830483 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   schg  33268 Jan  6  2005 ypchpass
6830483 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   schg  33268 Jan  6  2005 ypchsh

An attempt to rsync those file to a testbox running FreeBSD 4.11 with an
rsync 3.0.4 client that also has fileflags enabled results in this:

7862417 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   -     33268 Jan  6  2005 chfn
7862417 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   -     33268 Jan  6  2005 chpass
7862417 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   -     33268 Jan  6  2005 chsh
7862417 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   -     33268 Jan  6  2005 ypchfn
7862417 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   -     33268 Jan  6  2005 ypchpass
7862417 -r-sr-xr-x   6 root  wheel   -     33268 Jan  6  2005 ypchsh

The rsync client seems to know that something is suppose to change
because it constantly tries to update one of the hardlink files:

testbox# rsync -avH --fileflags --force-change --no-inc-recursive
archiver.mydomain.net::ARCHIVE4 / 
receiving file list ... done
usr/bin/chpass

sent 5155 bytes  received 1780408 bytes  274702.00 bytes/sec
total size is 957839616  speedup is 536.44

To compound the issue, if I restore the schg flag on the files listed
and rerun rsync, the rsync client strips the flag off. 

Since this sort of updating works just fine when running between two
FreeBSD 7.3 servers so I'm guessing this is a bug in my rsync client
that comes from the fact that FreeBSD4 is really old.

Jonathan 



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