Using rsync to backup a Windows-hosted share over Samba in FreeBSD

Question

I am trying to backup a Windows-hosted share, using rsync, from a FreeBSD8.2 box:

bash$ sudo -i
bash#  uname -a
FreeBSD zeus.companyname.gr 8.2-RELEASE ...amd64
bash# cat /root/.nsmbrc
...
[MACHINENAME:ADMINISTRATOR]
password=mysuperuncrackablepassword
bash# mount_smbfs -N -E utf-8:cp737 -I 192.168.0.2 //Administrator@machinename/f$ /iso1/
bash# ls -l -raw /iso1/prj/
ΠΡΟΕΤΟΙΜΑΣΙΑ ΔΕΔΟΜΕΝΩΝ ΠΑΡΕΛΘΟΝΤΩΝ ΕΤΩΝ
Πανεπιστήμιο - Προβολή, Δημοσιότητα

In plain words, I correctly see folders with Greek characters (locale-specific). The listing above is from a PuTTY session (i.e. an SSH session), and PuTTY was configured to translate UTF-8 by default.

Note I have not touched the locale:

bash# locale
LANG=
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_ALL=

So all seems to be OK.

However, when I tried rsyncing from the mounted folder, some files appear to vanish...

bash# rsync --inplace -rltvxp /iso1/ /backups/backup-machinename/
sending incremental file list
file has vanished: "/iso1/prj/..."

The message "file has vanished" means that rsync called the proper system calls to read the contents of a folder (dir/dirent I believe), and when it later tried to read one of the contained files, it did not find it - i.e. "open(2)" failed.

I checked the reported file: (a) it exists, (b) it has world-readable permissions.

I then assumed that the cp737 (Greek codepage) is the problem, so I mounted again with...

bash$ mount_smbfs -N -E utf-8:utf-8 -I 192.168.0.2 //Administrator@machinename/f$ /iso1/

...that is, I used utf-8 for the Windows side, too. When I tried rsync again, however, it got stuck (!) with 100% CPU utilization... Attaching with GDB showed:

bash# gdb /usr/local/bin/rsync 3109
GNU gdb 6.1.1 [FreeBSD]
Attaching to program: /usr/local/bin/rsync, process 3109
Reading symbols from /lib/libc.so.7...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
Loaded symbols for /lib/libc.so.7
Reading symbols from /libexec/ld-elf.so.1...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
Loaded symbols for /libexec/ld-elf.so.1
0x0000000800709c0a in getdirentries () from /lib/libc.so.7

...so it appears rsync is stuck waiting for getdirentries to return, or each call to getdirentries takes an impossible amount of time...

Any ideas?

Has anybody managed to do what I am doing? I.e. Use FreeBSD to rsync files with locale-specific characters in their filenames, from a Windows share that is mounted via mount_smbfs?

P.S. In case anyone wonders why I try to do this, the answer is simple: ZFS.

Answer 1

I'm not sure that running rsync over samba is a good idea. I don't know what rsync does internally, but it may generate a lot of network traffic in order to check what files have changed.

There's also a windows version of rsync, which can be run as a system service (http://www.brentnorris.net/rsyncntdoc.html). This way, you don't have the network load and because it only uses local calls on the machine to be backupped, it may fix above problems as well. I used this method in order to backup users laptops.