rsync causing disk sleeps and loss of apps

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Mon, 2011-01-31 at 10:16 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Sunday 30 January 2011 18:38:04 Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Sun, 2011-01-30 at 15:23 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > > I'm trying to get rsync to operate on a number of directories, but not
> > > in a
> > > mirror situation where I can easily use an existing app.  I therefore
> > > wanted
> > > to set up a shell script which can be run over the network using
> > > keychain to
> > > provide the necessary passwords.  On a single box it works perfectly,
> > > but of
> > > course the network makes it more complicated.
> > > 
> > > Part of the problem may be that I have followed too many how-tos, and
> > > set
> > > things up in a way that fight.  First, to get keychain correctly
> > > running -
> > > 
> > > Keychain is set up in .bash_profile and works.  Then I read that if
> > > you are
> > > going to run a script with cron you need to eval keychain within your
> > > script
> > > as it works in its own restricted environment.  This makes sense - but
> > > does
> > > that cause problems when I run tests in bash, since keychain is
> > > already
> > > running?
> > 
> > I think you're going about this the wrong way. AFAIK keychain is the KDE
> > equivalent to Gnome's seahorse, i.e. an encryption manager designed to
> > handle multiple keys for online sessions in a user-friendly way. However
> > what you actually need for secure backup with rsync is simply SSH using
> > RSA authentication, which doesn't require a password. Just generate a
> > key pair (man ssh) and use the id_rsa file for authentication, running
> > the cronjob as yourself and not root.
> > 
> That's exactly what keychain is/does.  The rsa authentication takes care of 
> password requirements.  That's why I'm using it.

What I'm trying to say is that if you have the key pair set up, you
don't need keychain. SSH will just read the id_rsa file directly as long
as it runs as you, and you can set up cron to run the job as you (rather
than root) by using your own crontab and not root's (i.e. set up
cron.allow). Maybe I'm not understanding something here ...

poc