rsync splits filenames, creates special characters where none are, weird permissions

[Lenz Weber]

Hello,
I have a quite unusual encoding problem (?).

I call rsync with the following parameters:

/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids --delete-excluded \
     --rsh="/usr/bin/ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -i \
     /etc/rsnapshot_ssh_certs/mykey" \
     --link-dest=/data/snapshots/hourly.1/folder/mail/ \
     rsyncbackup at server:/var/backups/mail/. \
     /data/snapshots/hourly.0/folder/mail/

Where the local destination /data/snapshots is an NFS volume mounted with the flags
    (rw,noatime,addr=192.168.1.XX)
and the source is a symlink to a zfs snapshot - that looks like this:
    /var/backups/mail -> /tank/mail/.zfs/snapshot/zfs-auto-snap_hourly-2015-01-07-1417

as far as I can tell, both systems work with UTF8 just fine (source is Ubuntu 14.04 and target is Debian Lenny)

Now there seems to be a problem while gathering or transferring the file list,
as rsync tries to create files/folders that share a part with real files on the source,
but with additional characters, sometimes cut off, without the preceding parent folder et cetera.

The source file names in this case look like this:

/var/backups/mail/redacted-domain/catchall/Maildir/.Sent/cur/1313508314.M654736P32713V0000000000000801I000B03CC_6.redacted-hostname,S=42352:2,S
/var/backups/mail/redacted-domain/info/Maildir/.Sent/cur/1313508314.M654736P32713V0000000000000801I000B03CC_6.redacted-hostname,S=42352:2,S

but rsync fails on files like this, that clearly do not exist:

skipping non-regular file "2713V0000000000000801I000B03CC_6.redacted-hostname,S=423\#001\#305\#001O\#233\#240é"
skipping non-regular file "2713V0000000000000801I000B03CC_6.redacted-hostname,S=42352:2,S"
skipping non-regular file "83E13498714.M297793P23544V000"
skipping non-regular file "Ø \#201"
skipping non-regular file "redacted-domain/catchall/Maildir/.Sent/cur/1301490998.M622842P6671V0000000000000801I00280BD9_0.redacted-hostname\#004"
skipping non-regular file "2713V0000000000000801I000B03CC_6.redacted-hostname,S=pedition/courierimapkeywords/:list"


while skipping/failing is still the good part, it even creates folders and files with names like
dr--rw--wt   2   48    49   4.0K Apr  9  1970 00B03C3_0.redacted-hostname,S=559475:2,S?s?NffJ??
c--SrwS-w-   1 root    66 48, 37 Aug 22  1995 317028.M727693P4967V0000000000000801I000C23B2_0.redacted-hostname,S
dr-Srw---x   2   48 staff   4.0K Aug 15  1995 6683671.M93103P25845V0000000000000801I002E40C9_0.

take a look at the garbled up file permissions, not to forget that these files are created in the target directory root instead of a subdirectory.


I have been using rsync happily for years, but after adding this new source server, nothing seems to work.
Is this a bug in combination with zfs?
Is this known?
Is there a workaround?

Please help me,
Lenz