Hilarious session error with rsync/ssh

For the sake of experimenting, I installed Debian Lenny into VirtualBox on the Winsucks machine, being lazy I used the network installation ISO hehe.

One of the things I dislike about Linux distros, is they don’t seem to take kindly to a leading capitol letter in usernames for some reason. Debian’s installer also (logically) set my uid/gid to 1000. Rather then map between uid/gid, I merely use the same values for my account on all machines. Since BSD could care less, I also use ‘Terry’ instead of ‘terry’ when possible ^_^.

While setting up for the test, I also changed my accounts uid/gid; oh boy is the vipw program talkative. In doing that, and then running the test from a shell w/o logging out and back in again first, resulting in this funny error message:

terry@virtuous:~$ rsync -arz --links --safe-links --no-D -tx -e 'ssh -l Terry' --rsync-path='cd /srv/rsync/conf && /usr/local/bin/rsync' -n  --stats Terry@vectra::home /home/Terry
You don't exist, go away!
rsync: connection unexpectedly closed (0 bytes received so far) [receiver]
rsync error: error in rsync protocol data stream (code 12) at io.c(635) [receiver=3.0.3]
terry@virtuous:~$

Making sure my sessions uid/gid are correct with the system databases however, fixes that lol.

Currently, I’ve setup VirtualBox to boot Debian into console mode and run it ‘headless’ with ssh+x11 forwarding. Should we say, I’m more then comfortable using a unix shell, ;-).