rsync remote-to-remote is not supported

RonaldBarnes

rsync

Referring to source and targets for rsync, course material says:

both may be remote

Yet, when I RTFM on"Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS" , it says otherwise:

Rsync copies files either to or from a remote host, or locally on the current
host (it does not support copying files between two remote hosts).

Testing on an Ubuntu 20.04 system:

$ rsync -va host1:/tmp/rsync.remote-to-remote.test user@host2:/tmp

The source and destination cannot both be remote.
rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1303) [Receiver=3.1.3]

Gotta admit, it would be a nice feature to have instead of scp-ing remote-to-remote.

RonaldBarnes

Interesting that on Ubuntu 18.04.5, no rsyncd.conf is created by default.

Contents of /etc/default/rsync state:

Don't forget to create an appropriate config file, else the daemon will not start.

And, systemctl status rsync.service is also interesting in a related way:

systemctl status rsync.service
● rsync.service - fast remote file copy program daemon
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/rsync.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: inactive (dead)
Condition: start condition failed at Thu 2021-01-28 11:56:31 PST; 3 days ago

systemctl cat rsync.service
/lib/systemd/system/rsync.service
[Unit]
Description=fast remote file copy program daemon
ConditionPathExists=/etc/rsyncd.conf

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rsync --daemon --no-detach

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

coop

RHEL/CentOS 8 also forbids remote-to-remote copying. They do not have a "rsync" service by default, but it is part of the "rsync-daemon" package, which the documentation says

Rsync can be used to offer read only access to anonymous clients. This package provides the anonymous rsync service.

It's not needed to do machine to machine rsync and should not be installed unless needed to set up an rsync server I guess.

lee42x

Darn, it used to work. Thank you for pointing this out, the reference for remote-2-remote will be removed.

Thank you.