Re: Anyone know how to rsync or ssh to an ftp site? (Follow on to Tar Oddity)

As Patrick O'Callaghan has pointed out, the target site must be running an rsync daemon for you to connect with your rsync client. Fortunately this is usually rather simple to determine:

$ rsync rsync://ftp.target.site
    

--or--

$ rsync rsync://rsync.target.site
    

The actual DNS name of the rsync site may take some guessing, and you can always use an absolute IP address if you now it. If there's an rsync daemon running on that site, it should respond with the contents of the /etc/rsyncd.conf file following the initialization section. Those contents will guide you to wherever the folder(s)/file(s) may be that you want to fetch. For example, here locally I can type:

$ rsync rsync://lion
pub             entire 1TB array
centos          Centos 5.4 mirror
cygwin          Cygwin mirror
f12             Fedora 12 General Release
f12_updates     Fedora 12 Updates
rawhide         Fedora Rawhide / Development
    

To create or update a local mirror of the F12 Updates repository on my rsync server "lion" I just type:

$ rsync -acvxzHP --delete rsync://lion/pub/f12_updates/ /pub/fedora/linux/updates/12/
    

Hope this helps.

If all the remote site gives you is ftp, you could use either a GUI-
based FTP client locally (such as kasablanca [KDE] or gftp [GTK])
or a command-line batch FTP client (such as ncftp/ncftpput/ncftpget).

rsync would be nice, but in a pinch.........
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer                      ricks@xxxxxxxx -