[EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
> Could you please explain more about what you have in mind for this
> feature? Do you want Samba to transparently proxy through to an rsync
> server? Where does smbclient come in to it?
Hi again,
My idea is to use smbclient for mirroring NT clients. I know
this can be accomplished through smbmounting the NT shares and running
rsync locally, but I've found that smbfs isn't as reliable as I'd like.
For example, right now I'm wrestling with the problem that smbfs won't
let me list large directories, so rsync just treats them as empty and
doesn't mirror them. This isn't the case with smbclient. In the past,
I've used smbclient's 'tar' features to backup NT shares directly to
tape. This works, but it's slow and I'd like to be able to use rsync
instead to maintain a mirror of the NT share on a remote machine.
I've also looked into running the cygwin-based rsync and sshd
on the NT box. In this case, I run into problems with getting transparent,
passwordless access (for unattended mirroring), and just the difficulty of
getting a working version of rsync, sshd and cygwin.dll installed and
configured.
(Not to mention the fact that you also need 'mount' to get to drives other than
"C:".) After playing around with one machine and getting it to sort of work,
I found that what I'd done didn't work on a second machine, so I've dropped the
project for now. In any case, the lack of passwordless access alone is a
killer.
So, anyway, the addition of rsync features to smbclient would
be a very convenient solution to these problems. It would allow rsync
mirrors of NT shares without the need to install any additional software
on the NT machines, and I'd bet it would be faster than the smbfs/rsync
combination, since an rsync-enabled smbclient could take advantage of
the knowledge that it's dealing with and SMB-mounted share.
For syntax, I'd suggest something like:
smbclient //server/share -Sav /mirror/server/share
(Using "-S" for rsync, since "-R" is already taken.)
I hope that clarifies what I had in mind.
Bryan
--
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Bryan Wright |"If you take cranberries and stew them like
Physics Department | applesauce, they taste much more like prunes
University of Virginia | than rhubarb does." -- Groucho
Charlottesville, VA 22901 |
(804) 924-7218 | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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