NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
rsync, OS X and permissions woes
Having a rather tough time tonight, trying to back up my ReadyNAS Ultra 6 Pro to a Snow Leopard Mac Pro over my LAN using rsync. I'm almost there, but I'm falling at the final fence because of permissions; it keeps rejecting my password.
I've always found OS X's treatment of user accounts confusing when trying to use them over the network. Does anyone have any useful links where I might be able to enlighten myself? I just can't seem to grasp it. For a start, OS X doesn't use /etc/passwd to store the account info, so you can't even find out the userid. Then there's the question of how to format the user name when entering credentials for network shares... there seem to be as many ways of connecting to servers as there are people to dream them up, and the inexperienced user is left completely bewildered. If my OS X Accounts Preferences panel says that my admin account is called "Firstname Lastname", how does that translate into a string that will work when entered into the Login: field of the "Add a New Backup Job" page for an rsync job?
Having been a UNIX guy a decade or two ago (which SHOULD be an advantage...!), I thought the login username was something different from the user's full name, but since the preferences panel doesn't SHOW me the login username, how on Earth am I supposed to provide it for the ReadyNAS backup?
Or is the full name actually the login username??
Very confused :(
I've always found OS X's treatment of user accounts confusing when trying to use them over the network. Does anyone have any useful links where I might be able to enlighten myself? I just can't seem to grasp it. For a start, OS X doesn't use /etc/passwd to store the account info, so you can't even find out the userid. Then there's the question of how to format the user name when entering credentials for network shares... there seem to be as many ways of connecting to servers as there are people to dream them up, and the inexperienced user is left completely bewildered. If my OS X Accounts Preferences panel says that my admin account is called "Firstname Lastname", how does that translate into a string that will work when entered into the Login: field of the "Add a New Backup Job" page for an rsync job?
Having been a UNIX guy a decade or two ago (which SHOULD be an advantage...!), I thought the login username was something different from the user's full name, but since the preferences panel doesn't SHOW me the login username, how on Earth am I supposed to provide it for the ReadyNAS backup?
Or is the full name actually the login username??
Very confused :(
4 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- When you create an account on OSX, beside the "First Lastname" login, you can also define a short name (it will be "firstlastname" by default).
If you control-click on a user name OS X Accounts Preferences, you'll get more advanced info. There you'll find the user ID, group ID, and the short name. (I only have a X.5 system at hand tight know, but I'm quite sure it's still valid with more recent OSes). - Thanks pdelges, that's useful to know - I just tried it and it works just fine. Seems my user id is simply my first name. I can't remember whether I tried that one or not. I actually gave up on rsync and I'm now using SuperDuper to back up from the CIFS mount to my local JBOD array. It seems to be working, although it's going to take around 4 days to back up 8 Tb, even over gigabit Ethernet, which is a little disappointing...
- Verifying the data will double the backup time - though I think it is important to ensure that the data arrives intact.
- I just realised I said SuperDuper above. Actually I didn't use that because it doesn't allow individual folder control; I used Carbon Copy Cloner instead. I searched pretty hard for a verify option but all I could find was something that activates a checksum comparison. What I'm hoping is that I can re-do the backups with checksums enabled after the files have been copied once, and it will just go through the data and compare checksums. I tried enabling it from the start, but ended up aborting because it was REALLY slow...
Mostly my NAS contains backups of other machines, plus a collection of DVDs - all of which could be re-generated if necessary; if the backups are corrupted then I can simply re-do them from scratch instead of trying to refresh them. However, there is a small amount of irreplaceable data... archives of important projects etc. Maybe I can try the checksum option just on that, if I can work out how.
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
