[linux] rsync - mkstemp failed: Permission denied (13)

I have the following setup to periodically rsync files from server A to server B. Server B has the rsync daemon running with the following configuration:

read only = false
use chroot = false
max connections = 4
syslog facility = local5
log file = /var/adm/rsyncd.log
munge symlinks = false
secrets file = /etc/rsyncd.secrets
numeric ids = false
transfer logging = true
log format = %h %o %f %l %b


[BACKUP]
        path = /path/to/archive
        auth users = someuser

From server A I am issuing the following command:

rsync -adzPvO --delete --password-file=/path/to/pwd/file/pwd.dat /dir/to/be/backedup/ [email protected]::BACKUP

BACKUP directory is fully read/write/execute to everyone. When I run the rsync command from server A, I see:

afile.txt
         989 100%    2.60kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#78, to-check=0/79)

for each and everyfile in the directory I wish to backup. It fails when I get to writing tmp files:

rsync: mkstemp "/.afile.txt.PZQvTe" (in BACKUP) failed: Permission denied (13)

Hours of googling later and I still can't resolve what seems to be a very simple permission issue. Advice? Thanks in advance.

Additional Information

I just noticed the following occurs at the beginning of the process:

rsync: failed to set permissions on "/." (in BACKUP): Permission denied (13)

Is it trying to set permission on "/"?

Edit

I am logged in as the user - someuser. My destination directory has full read/write/execute permission for everyone, including it's contents. In addition, the destination directory is owned by someuser and in someuser's group.

Follow up

I've found using SSH solves this

This might not suit everyone since it does not preserve the original file permissions but in my case it was not important and it solved the problem for me. rsync has an option --chmod:

--chmod This option tells rsync to apply one or more comma-separated lqchmodrq strings to the permission of the files in the transfer. The resulting value is treated as though it was the permissions that the sending side supplied for the file, which means that this option can seem to have no effect on existing files if --perms is not enabled.

This forces the permissions to be what you want on all files/directories. For example:

rsync -av --chmod=Du+rwx SRC DST

would add Read, Write and Execute for the user to all transferred directories.

I imagine a common error not currently mentioned above is trying to write to a mount space (e.g., /media/drivename) when the partition isn't mounted. That will produce this error as well.

If it's an encrypted drive set to auto-mount but doesn't, might be an issue of auto-unlocking the encrypted partition before attempting to write to the space where it is supposed to be mounted.

Windows: Check permissions of destination folders. Take ownership if you must to give rights to the account running the rsync service.

I had the same error while syncing files inside of a Docker container and the destination was a mounted volume (Docker for mac), I run rsync via su-exec <user>. I was able to resolve it by running rsync as root with -og flags (keep owner and group for destination files).

I'm still not sure what caused that issue, the destination permissions were OK (I run chown -R <user> for destination dir before rsync), perhaps somehow related to Docker for Mac slow filesystem.

I have Centos 7 server with rsyncd on board: /etc/rsyncd.conf

[files]
path = /files

By default selinux blocks access for rsyncd to /files folder

# this sets needed context to my /files folder
sudo semanage fcontext -a -t rsync_data_t '/files(/.*)?'
sudo restorecon -Rv '/files'
# sets needed booleans
sudo setsebool -P rsync_client 1

Disabling selinux is an easy but not a good solution

I had the same issue in case of CentOS 7. I went through lot of articles ,forums but couldnt find out the solution. The problem was with SElinux. Disabling SElinux at the server end worked. Check SELinux status at the server end (from where you are pulling data using rysnc) Commands to check SELinux status and disable it

$getenforce

Enforcing ## this means SElinux is enabled

$setenforce 0

$getenforce

Permissive

Now try running rsync command at the client end ,it worked for me. All the best!

If you're on a Raspberry pi or other Unix systems with sudo you need to tell the remote machine where rsync and sudo programs are located.

I put in the full path to be safe.

Here's my example:

rsync --stats -paogtrh --progress --omit-dir-times --delete --rsync-path='/usr/bin/sudo /usr/bin/rsync'  /mnt/drive0/ [email protected]:/mnt/drive0/

Make sure the user you're rsync'd into on the remote machine has write access to the contents of the folder AND the folder itself, as rsync tried to update the modification time on the folder itself.

Rsync daemon by default uses nobody/nogroup for all modules if it is running under root user. So you either need to define params uid and gid to the user you want, or set them to root/root.

Take attention on -e ssh and jenkins@localhost: in next example:

rsync -r  -e ssh --chown=jenkins:admin --exclude .git --exclude Jenkinsfile --delete ./ jenkins@localhost:/home/admin/web/xxx/public

That helped me

P.S. Today, i realized that when you change (add) jenkins user to some group, permission will apply after slave (agent) restart. And my solution (-e ssh and jenkins@localhost:) need only when you can't restart agent/server.

Yet still another way to get this symptom: I was rsync'ing from a remote machine over ssh to a Linux box with an NTFS-3G (FUSE) filesystem. Originally the filesystem was mounted at boot time and thus owned by root, and I was getting this error message when I did an rsync push from the remote machine. Then, as the user to which the rsync is pushed, I did:

$ sudo umount /shared
$ mount /shared

and the error messages went away.

I had a similar issue, but in my case it was because storage has only SFTP, without ssh or rsync daemons on it. I could not change anything, bcs this server was provided by my customer.

rsync could not change the date and time for the file, some other utilites (like csync) showed me other errors: "Unable to create temporary file Clock skew detected". If you have access to the storage-server - just install openssh-server or launch rsync as a daemon here.

In my case - I could not do this and solution was: lftp. lftp's usage for syncronization is below:

lftp -c "open -u login,password sftp://sft.domain.tld/; mirror -c --verbose=9 -e -R -L /srs/folder /rem/folder"

/src/folder - is the folder on my PC, /rem/folder - is sftp://sft.domain.tld/rem/folder.

you may find mans by the link lftp.yar.ru/lftp-man.html

run in root access ssh chould solve this problem

or chmod 0777 /dir/to/be/backedup/

or chown username:user /dir/to/be/backedup/

Surprisingly nobody have mentioned all powerful SUDO. Had the same problem and sudo fixed it

Even though you got this working, I recently had a similar encounter and no SO or Google searching was of any help as they all dealt with basic permission issues wheres the solution below is somewhat of an off setting that you wouldn't even think to check in most situations.

One thing to check for with permission denied that I recently found having issues with rsync myself where permissions were exactly the same on both servers including the owner and group but rsync transfers worked one way on one server but not the other way.

It turned out the server with problems that I was getting permission denied from had SELinux enabled which in turn overrides POSIX permissions on files/folders. So even though the folder in question could have been 777 with root running, the command SELinux was enabled and would in turn overwrite those permissions which produced a "permission denied"-error from rsync.

You can run the command getenforce to see if SELinux is enabled on the machine.

In my situation I ended up just disabling SELINUX completely because it wasn't needed and already disabled on the server that was working fine and just caused problems being enabled. To disable, open /etc/selinux/config and set SELINUX=disabled. To temporarily disable you can run the command setenforce 0 which will set SELinux into a permissive state rather then enforcing state which causes it to print warnings instead of enforcing.

I had the same issue, so I first SSH into the server to confirm that I able to log in to the server by using the command:

ssh -i /Users/Desktop/mypemfile.pem [email protected]

Then in New Terminal

I copied a small file to the server by using SCP, to make sure I am able to make a connection:

scp -i /Users/Desktop/mypemfile.pem /Users/Desktop/test.file [email protected]:/home/user/test/

Then In the same new terminal, I tried running rsync:

rsync -avz -e "ssh -i /Users/Desktop/mypemfile.pem" /Users/Desktop/backup/image.img.gz [email protected]:

I encountered the same problem and solved it by chown the user of the destination folder. The current user does not have the permission to read, write and execute the destination folder files. Try adding the permission by chmod a+rwx <folder/file name>.