Re: rsync, beagle, lsetxattr

[David Maus <maus.david@gmail.com>]

At Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:20:36 +0000 (UTC),
Camaleón wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:35:14 -0500, Rick Pasotto wrote:
> 
> > I used to have beagle installed but have now purged it. When I run rsync
> > there are many error messages of the following type:
> > 
> > rsync: rsync_xal_set:
> > lsetxattr("home/rick/12-05-01.txt","user.Beagle.AttrTime") failed:
> > Operation not supported (95) rsync: rsync_xal_set:
> > lsetxattr("home/rick/12-05-01.txt","user.Beagle.Fingerprint") failed:
> > Operation not supported (95) rsync: rsync_xal_set:
> > lsetxattr("home/rick/12-05-01.txt","user.Beagle.MTime") failed:
> > Operation not supported (95) rsync: rsync_xal_set:
> > lsetxattr("home/rick/12-05-01.txt","user.Beagle.Uid") failed: Operation
> > not supported (95)
> 
> It looks like rsync is trying to apply some kind of "stamp" to a file and 
> that operation is not being allowed.
>
> > How can I fix these files so I no longer get these messages?
> 
> Dunno, but just make sure the target filesystem you are using with rsync  
> allows extended atributes ("user_xattr"), as that seems to be what the 
> error log is trying to tell you.

Exactly: Beagle stores some metadata in the filesystem's extended
attributes [1] and whatever rsync is doing it fails to set the
extended attributes on the target filesystems because it does not
support extended attribues ("xattr").

So, there are two options:

(a) enable xattr on the target filesystem when possible

Depends on the filesystem you use.

(b) if the decission to remove beagle is final, remove the metadata.

To remove all metadata on all files on the source filesystem this may
work:

,----
| find . -exec bash -c 'for attr in `attr -lq "{}"`; do attr -r $attr "{}"; done' ';'
`----

it processes all findes in current directory (find .) and executes for
each file and directory a bash (-exec bash) that in turn processes all
extended attributes (for attr in `attr -lq "{}"`) and removes each of
them.

(c) tell rsync to ignore xattr 

I'm not sure about (c) but the man page of rsync[2] lists:

,----
| 	 -X, --xattrs                preserve extended attributes
`----

So for (c) you should try to not use rsync's -X command.

Regards,

  -- David

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes

[2] man 1 rsync
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